Introduction

libvarnam is a cross platform, self learning, open source library which support transliteration and reverse transliteration for Indian languages. At the core is a C shared library providing algorithms and patterns for transliteration. libvarnam has a simple learning module built-in which can learn words to improve the transliteration experience.

Installing libvarnam

wget http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/varnamproject/libvarnam/source/libvarnam-$VERSION.tar.gz
tar -xvf libvarnam-$VERSION.tar.gz
cd libvarnam-$VERSION
cmake . && make
sudo make install

This will install libvarnam shared libraries and varnamc command line utility. varnamc can be used to quickly try out varnam.

Installation on Windows

In Windows, you can compile libvarnam using Visual Studio. Use the following cmake command to generate the project files.

cmake -DBUILD_TESTS=false -DBUILD_VST=false -DRUN_TESTS=false .

Usage

Transliterate

Usage: varnamc -s lang_code -t word

varnamc -s ml -t varnam
 വർണം
 വർണമേറിയത്

Reverse Transliterate

Usage: varnamc -s lang_code -r word

varnamc -s ml -r വർണം
 varnam

Word corpus

libvarnam is a learning system. It works better with a word corpus. You can obtain the word corpus and make varnam learn all the words. This will enable libvarnam to provide intelligent suggestions.

Here is an example of loading Malayalam word corpus:

mkdir words
cd words
wget http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/varnamproject/words/ml/ml.tar.gz
tar -xvf ml.tar.gz
varnamc  -s ml --learn-from .

This will take some time depends on how much words you are loading.

Here are some more word corpus

There is a --import-learnings-from option to import files which already has the learnt paramaeter. Importing these files don't take too much time as the word corpus.

What next?

If you just wanted to use varnam for input, you have the following options

Varnam on iBUS - For Linux
Varnam online editor - Platform agnostic

If you are a programmer, you will be interested in libvarnam. You can use it to provide indian language support in your applications. libvarnam can be used from different programming languages.

Mozilla Public License

This Source Code Form is subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public License, v. 2.0. If a copy of the MPL was not distributed with this file, You can obtain one at https://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/.

Kishore96in/libvarnam