Compiling and Installing GLARF and the bundled Charniak parser on MacOS X

It seems that I keep getting handed buggy code to install. These are cases of research software where the developers didn’t make the effort to make sure their tool works on the platforms it should.

[GLARF][] (Grammatical and Logical Argument Representation Framework) is, in their words, “a typed feature structure framework for representing regularizations of parse trees”. It is a processing pipeline from NYU with rich output including many types of structure in the given text. However, it is clearly a case of software whose maintenance was abandoned when it “worked” for them. The whole install and run procedure is pretty messy, but at least it’s documented. The problem is, following it step by step doesn’t work on my MacBook. As usual, I needed to hack through it a bit.

The Charniak parser distributed with GLARF has now been superseded by the [BLLIP parser][]. The new one is tricky to compile as well, but I have yet to see if it plugs into GLARF, so I leave this for a future post.

Here are the steps I needed to take to make GLARF work:

Download and unzip the GLARF package.
Make sure you have `sbcl` in your path, and your `perl` is in (or linked from) `/usr/bin/perl`
Set the environment variables. I like to make a shell script to set them so I don’t have to do it every time. So I write something looking like this: [sourcecode lang=”bash”] \# glarf\_env.sh export GLARF=/Users/vene/code/GLARF export GLARF\_JET=\${GLARF}/JET export PATH=\$PATH:. [/sourcecode]
Then for every session when I want to use GLARF, I do `source glarf_env.sh`.
Compile GLARF by running `$GLARF/commands-2010/compile-glarf`. *Note:* this only compiles the pipeline lisp code.
Now, according to their instructions, you’re done. However, if you try to run it, you’d notice the output is incomplete. (It goes through the named entity extraction part, but it doesn’t run the parser.) The reason for this is that they distribute the Charniak parser with a precompiled binary that runs on Linux, but not on the Mac. So we need to recompile it. So go to `$GLARF/charniak-parser-2005/parser05Aug16-static/PARSE2 `, run `make clean` and roll up your sleeves.
Obviously, simply running `make` doesn’t work. [As documented by Pawel Mazur][], we need to edit `BchartSm.C` to add the line `#include “GotIter.h”`
On my system this still isn’t enough, and I get some linker errors. By poking through the Makefile, I noticed I could fix it by commenting out the 5th line: `LDFLAGS=-static`.
Now run make and watch it work, hurrah! \o/
To see if GLARF itself works now, go to `$GLARF/commands-2010/run-glarf/` and run `make-all-glarf-a sample-files-a N`. You should get beautiful, beautiful GLARF output files.

GLARF

BLLIP

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