BitPar software
===============

developed by Helmut Schmid

Copyright (C)
Institut für maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung
Universität Stuttgart

BitPar is freely available for research and education.

BitPar is a parser for probabilistic context-free grammars. It is able
to do full parsing (including the generation of parse forests and the
computations of inside-outside probabilities) with large PCFGs
extracted from treebanks.

The implementation of BitPar is described in the paper "Efficient
Parsing of Highly Ambiguous Context-Free Grammars with Bit Vectors"
available at http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/~schmid.

Its usage is explained in the Unix man pages in the subdirectory man1.

A finite-state automaton for the classification of unknown English
words (see the option -w in the man pages) can be generated from the
data in the wordclass subdirectory. After installing the Stuttgart
Finite State Transducer tools (available at
http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/projekte/gramotron/SOFTWARE/SFST.html).
you need to call the script compile.sh.

Installation
------------

1) Change to the directory src
   > cd BitPar/src

2) Compile the parser by calling GNU make
   > make

3) Copy the program bitpar to its installation directory (e.g. /usr/local/bin)

If you get an error message saying that some hashing libraries could
not be found, you should comment the following line
  SGILIB = -DSGIext
in the file "Makefile".


Please send questions, comments and bug reports to
schmid@ims.uni-stuttgart.de
