
                   Persian Link Grammar
                   --------------------
                       By Jon Dehdari
       Brigham Young University Linguistics Department
                         2003-2005


This README is for 'persianlg', a Persian (Farsi) implementation of the
Link Grammar (LG) syntactic parser.  The LG Parser is a new approach to
parsing sentences, and was developed at Carnegie Melon University.  The
parser works by simply linking words together.  Directionality and
distance are the primary constraints given, and are found in the 4.0.dict
file.

The Persian PersianLG implementation is the first full non-English
implementation, to my knowledge.  It works a little differently than
the English version, due to the more complex word structure.
Morphological pre-parsing is required, either by hand, using the
included stemmer (stemmer.pl) [1], or using the Persian-pckimmo
morphology engine.  The LG-Soar framework, developed in the BYU Soar
research group, has tied both the LG parser and the PC-Kimmo engine
together, to provide seamless integration of morphology and syntax.
Thus manual morphology pre-parsing is not necessary, nor is cutting
and pasting pckimmo output to the link-parser input.

For example, an unvoweled text like 'mn midAnm kh tu rfti.' (I know
that you went), should go into the LG parser as 'mn mi dAn m kh tu rf t i.'
See the orthography.txt file for the romanization scheme used.

This package is Free Software, licensed under Lesser General Public
License v.2.1 (www.fsf.org).  See LICENSE for details.  Note: the
original PersianLG was made available under GPLv2; but, as of 2014,
Jon Dehdari has consented to changing the license to LGPLv2.1 so that
it can be included with the main Link Grammar project.


[1]  The stemmmer is located in the /morphology/fa directory.  An 
example usage is:

   ./persianparse.sh 'man midAnam keh tu rafti.'

or, equivalently:

   echo -e 'man midAnam keh tu rafti.\n' | ./stemmer.pl -u | link-parser fa

See also:
https://github.com/jonsafari/perstem
