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Institute for Natural Language Processing

SFST - Stuttgart Finite State Transducer Tools

 
 

What is SFST?

SFST is a toolbox for the implementation of morphological analysers and other tools which are based on finite state transducer technology.

The SFST tools comprise

  • a compiler which translates transducer programs into minimised transducers
  • interactive and batch-mode analysis programs
  • tools for comparing and printing transducers
  • an efficient C++ transducer library

Features

  • freely available under the GNU Public License
  • easy to learn for users who are familiar with grep, sed, or Perl.
  • efficient implementation in C++
  • supports
    • a wide range of transducer operations
    • UTF-8 character coding
    • weighted transducers (basic functionality only)

Downloads

  • The source code of version 1.2 of the SFST tools
  • The source code of version 1.3 of the SFST tools (fst-print now produces a different output format which might affect the graphical viewers listed below)
  • A Debian package for SFST (created by Francis Tyers)
  • A short manual (included in the source code package)
  • A tutorial on the implementation of computational morphologies (included in the source code package)

Further Development

There are two projects which aim to extend the functionality of SFST in various ways: See also the contributions by other authors below.

Links

  • André Halama created Windows binaries for the SFST tools.
  • Alex Linke provided
    • an interface to the Graphviz tool for the graphical output of transducers.
  • Sebastian Nagel wrote
    • an Emacs mode for editing transducer files and
    • a Perl program which converts SFST transducers to the Graphviz format (similar to that of Alex Linke).
  • Stefan Evert also sent me a Graphviz converter.
  • Matthias Kistler provided a highlighting mode for the VIM editor.
  • Toni Arnold developed
    • a Python interface for the SFST library and
    • Emores, an Empirical MOrphological REaSoning engine for the automatic acquisition of lemmas from a word list.
  • Marius L. Jøhndal created a Ruby interface for the SFST library.


Please send comments, suggestions and bug reports to Helmut Schmid at FirstName.LastName@ims.uni-stuttgart.de.