How to install VISL CG3 on Mac, Windows and Linux

VISL CG3 is a neat tool for running constraint grammars (CGs) for things such as morphological disambiguation or syntactic parsing. Grammars of this formalism have been developed for a great many endangered Uralic languages boosting their NLP. And these CGs are actually easily available in UralicNLP for Python programmers.

Even for UralicNLP, a tool called vislcg3 needs to be installed on your machine, and it might be a tricky task if you cannot find the correct binaries for your operating system. Therefore I tailored this guide.

Mac OS X

For a macOS installation, run the following command in your terminal

curl https://mikakalevi.com/downloads/install_cg_macos.sh | sudo bash

This will download the binaries from the Apertium repository and install them in the correct places.

Linux

I have made a simple distribution independent installer script. If you are on a Debian based system, the script will configure a deb repository. For Redhat based systems, a yum repository will be configured… For the rest, cross your fingers as the script will try to compile from the source. 🀞

wget -qO- https://mikakalevi.com/downloads/install_cg_linux.sh | sudo bash

This works essentially like the command for OSX described above. If you are an unlucky one and your distribution is not supported, read the project installation instructions.

Windows

For Windows users, I have authored a nice graphical installer. It downloads the latest version of vislcg3, installs it in the Program Files folder and configures PATH variable. This means that you can run vislcg3.exe in whichever folder you want without using its absolute path. 😎

Download Windows installer

Next steps

Now that you finally have VISL CG3, you might be interested in the project website for more information. If you are only interested in using ready-made grammars, head to the UralicNLP GitHub to find out more. ☺️