[libvoikko] Lttoolbox (Apertium) morphology backend

[Harri Pitkänen]

On Wednesday 24 February 2010, Harri Pitkänen wrote:
> If I remember correctly, Apertium is already in Debian. I could take a
>  look  next week and see what can be done.

Well, I didn't wait until next week but implemented the backend already. You 
can try this by using the sources in SVN:

- On Debian unstable install packages lttoolbox, liblttoolbox3-3.1-0, 
liblttoolbox3-3.1-0-dev
- Check out SVN sources
- ./autogen.sh
- ./configure --prefix=/some/dir --enable-lttoolbox
- make install
- Copy stuff from http://www.puimula.org/htp/testing/apertium/ to
  ~/.voikko/2/mor-apertium/

Now you should have a dictionary variant "apertium" available. The test 
dictionary was copied from 
http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Lttoolbox#Using_as_a_library
and it recognizes words "car" and "cars". Event the spelling suggestions work:

$ /some/dir/bin/voikkospell -d apertium -s
car
C: car
cara
W: cara
S: cars
S: car


I must say I was quite impressed on how easy this was. No compilation 
problems, no license hassles (Apertium uses exactly the same license as 
libvoikko), easy to use API. API documentation was a bit hard to find though.

I also tried to build some of the real word dictionaries but could not figure 
out which one would work and how it should be used.

Harri