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What is NooJ?
NooJ is a linguistic development environment that allows linguists to formalize several levels of linguistic phenomena: typography and spelling; lexicons of simple words, multiword units and discontinuous expressions; inflectional, derivational and productive morphology; local and structural syntax, transformational and semantic analysis and generation.
For each of these levels NooJ provides linguists with one formal framework specifically designed to facilitate the description of each phenomenon, as well as parsing/development/debugging tools designed to be as computationally efficient as possible, from Finite-State machines to Turing machines. This approach distinguishes NooJ from other computational linguistic frameworks which provide a unique formalism based on a compromise between power and efficiency.
As a corpus processing tool, NooJ allows all researchers and professional to extract information from general or technical corpora by applying sophisticated queries based on concepts rather than word forms and build indices, add semantic annotations, perform statistical analyses, etc.
MONO Version
NooJ is one of the most popular linguistic tools, but it was available only on Windows platforms using .NET framework. CESAR project recognized the need of potential NooJ users working on non-Windows platforms and planned to make NooJ platform independent.
This decision is further supported by the following reasons:
- Five of the six languages involved in the CESAR consortium has extensive resources developed in the NooJ linguistic development environment. The tool is also used by the consortium members to perform syntactic analysis in tasks like sentence and clause-segmentation, NP-recognition, predicate identification and the identification of the other sentence constituents (e.g. adverbials).
- NooJ is a truly multilingual platform: resources exist in no less than 14 languages ranging from Arabic, Chinese to Catalan and Hebrew not to mention major languages like Fench, English, Spanish, Portuguese. In other words, members of the partner consortiums have also a vested interest in enhancing and upgrading NooJ.
- Widespread use of NooJ is seriously limited by the fact that although freely available for research purposes it is not open source and suffers from limited interoperability and cross-platform availability.
The task was allocated to Institute Mihajlo Pupin and its team, in close collaboration with Prof. Max Silberztein, as the author of NooJ, managed to make NooJ platform independent using the MONO framework. The MONO version of NooJ is now operative on Mac OSX LION, LINUX Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUZE and other platforms.
The team is now involved in making a Java version of NooJ, which will be not only platform independent, but also open source.
Click here to download the MONO version of NooJ (installation files and Installation Guide).