This repository provides

• the 4lang concept dictionary, which contains manually written concept definitions
• the text_to_4lang module, which creates concept graph representations from running text
• the dict_to_4lang module, which builds more of these definitions from human-readable dictionaries

Our tools require an installation of the pymachine implementation of Eilenberg-machines, just clone it to your machine and run setup.py:

git clone https://github.com/kornai/pymachine.git
cd pymachine
python setup.py install

For lemmatization, 4lang uses the hunmorph tool, on most UNIX-based systems you can use these pre-compiled executables and models (just extract them in your 4lang directory). If they don't work on your system, you may have to download and recompile hunmorph and/or the model it uses following the instructions here. This process is quite error-prone, but please reach out to us and we'll be happy to help you!

NOTE: All remaining dependencies are required only for building 4lang graphs, so in case you only want to use the graphs we provide (e.g. for the machine similarity component of our Semeval STS system), you can skip the rest of this section and continue to download pre-compiled graphs.

For parsing dictionary definitions, 4lang requires the Stanford Dependency Parser. Additionally, text_to_4lang.py requires the Stanford CoreNLP toolkit for parsing and coreference resolution, while the dict_to_4lang tool requires jython for customized parsing via the Stanford Parser API. Both tools require a copy of the RNN-based parser model for English, which is distributed alongside the Stanford Parser.

After downloading and installing these tools, all you need to do is edit the stanford and corenlp sections of the default configuration file conf/default.cfg so that the relevant fields point to your installations of each tool and your copy of the englishRNN.ser.gz model (more on config files below).

We provide serialized machine graphs built from 4lang definitions as well as from the English Wiktionary (using the dict_to_4lang module). Unpacking this archive in your 4lang directory will place them in the data/machines directory, which is the default location for compiled machine graphs.

To use 4lang from our Semeval STS system you just need to edit the 4langpath and hunmorph_path attributes in your semeval config file so that they point to your 4lang directory and the downloaded hunmorph binaries, respectively.

To run each module on small test datasets, simply run

python src/dict_to_4lang.py
python src/text_to_4lang.py

Both tools can be configured by editing a copy of conf/default.cfg and running

python src/dict_to_4lang.py MY_CONFIG_FILE

to build 4lang-style definitions from a monolingual dictionary such as Wiktionary or Longman

cat INPUT_FILE | python src/text_to_4lang.py MY_CONFIG_FILE

to create concept graphs from running English text

This repository is maintained by Gábor Recski. Questions, suggestions, bug reports, etc. are very welcome and can be sent by email to recski at mokk bme hu.

If you use the 4lang module, please cite:

@unpublished{Kornai:2015a,
author = "Andr\'as Kornai and Judit \'Acs and M\'arton Makrai and D\'avid Nemeskey and Katalin Pajkossy and G\'abor Recski",
title = "Competence in Lexical Semantics",
year = 2015,
note = "{T}o appear in Proc. *SEM-2015"
}