Lingua-LinkParser-1.09.readme

  ==================================================================
  Lingua::LinkParser 1.09
  Copyright 2000-2003 by Dan Brian

  This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
  it under the same terms as Perl itself.
  ==================================================================

LINUX USERS:

   There is a namespace compatability conflict documented at:

     http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/Bug.html?id=4428

   If you get segfaults or "dictionary creation" errors, follow the advice 
   of Alan Buckeridge:

     There's a routine called 'advance' in the file 'read-dict.c' in the
     parser's source directory.  By replacing each occurrence of "advance"
     with something else (I used "ad_vance") and recompiling the parser, I
     was able to 'make' and 'make test' for Lingua::LinkParser.

   This has fixed the problem in all cases, as far as I'm aware. Thanks Alan.


Description

   To quote the Link Grammar documentation, "the Link Grammar Parser 
   is a syntactic parser of English, based on link grammar, an original 
   theory of English syntax. Given a sentence, the system assigns to it 
   a syntactic structure, which consists of set of labeled links 
   connecting pairs of words." Version 1.0 of this module implements the 
   new 4.0 parser API.

   PLEASE NOTE that there exist memory leaks with the calls that are 
   supposed to free sentence objects. This means that single processes 
   parsing many sentences will gradually grow larger. I am working to 
   resolve this problem.

Requirements

   To install Lingua::LinkParser you must have already downloaded, 
   compiled and install the Link Parser package from 
   http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/link/.

   This module has been compiled and tested with Perl 5.6 and 5.8 on Linux 
   2.2.13 & 2.2.14, and Perl 5.6 and 5.8 on OS X. Any incompatibilities 
   *should* be the result of lib issues within the Link Parser itself, but 
   these seem very stable.

Installation

   To begin installation type:

       perl Makefile.PL

   This will ask you where your Link Parser package directory is 
   located, and must contain the distribution obj/, include/, and data/
   directories, with obj/ containing compiled object files. This 
   might look something like "/home/username/system-4.1/link-4.1".

   Once the Makefile is written, you can build and test with:

      make
      make test

   On Linux, the make displays several warnings about redefined macros -
   these messages may be ignored.

   The test will load the parser dictionary files and parse a sample 
   sentence. If they do not, back up and figure out why before 
   installation. To install:

      make install

Documentation

   Full documentation is available in pod format within the .pm file:

      perldoc Lingua::LinkParser

   or

      perldoc ./LinkParser.pm

   The scripts in 'scripts/' demonstrate a general overview of the 
   functionality.

Todo

   There exist problems with the postscript output functions; I have 
   not debugged these. The output using the "parse" binary with the 
   "!postscript" toggle outputs PS that looks different from the 
   "get_postscript" function. For now, cutting and pasting the former 
   into a template seems to work.

   I need to add quite a few tests, since lots of stuff has been added.

Author

   Dan Brian <dan@brians.org>