README - 16 Jan 2011 Author: Jason Riesa <riesa@isi.edu> Picaro [v1.0]: A simple command-line alignment visualzation tool. Visualize alignments in grid-format. This brief README is oragnized as follows: I. REQUIREMENTS II. USAGE III. INPUT FORMAT IV. EXAMPLE USAGE V. NOTES I. REQUIREMENTS =============== Python v2.5 or higher is required. II. USAGE ========= Picaro takes as input 3 mandatory arguments and up to 2 optional arguments: Mandatory arguments: 1. -a1 <alignment1> where alignment1 is a path to an alignment file 2. -e <e> where e is a path to a file of English sentences 3. -f <f> where f is a path to a file of French sentences Optional arguments: 1. -a2 <a2> path to alignment2 file in f-e format 2. -maxlen <len> for each sentence pair, render only when each sentence has length in words <= len For historical reasons we use the labels e, f, English, and French, but any language pair will do. III. INPUT FORMAT ================= - Files e and f must be sentence-aligned - Alignment files must be in f-e format See included sample files in zh/ and es/. IV. EXAMPLE USAGE ================= WITH A SINGLE ALIGNMENT: $ picaro.py -e zh/sample.e -f zh/sample.f -a1 zh/sample.a COMPARING TWO ALIGNMENTS: $ picaro.py -e zh/sample.e -f zh/sample.f -a1 zh/alternate.a -a2 zh/sample.a When visualizing two alignments at once, refer to the following color scheme: Green blocks: alignments a1 and a2 agree Blue blocks: alignment a1 only Gold blocks: alignment a2 only V. NOTES ======== RIGHT-TO-LEFT TEXT: If you are using right-to-left text, e.g. Arabic, transliterate your text first. Terminals generally render unexpectedly with mixed left-to-right and right-to-left text. For Arabic, in particular, we use the Buckwalter translitation scheme [1] when using this tool. The following Perl module implements Buckwalter transliteration: http://search.cpan.org/~smrz/Encode-Arabic-1.8/lib/Encode/Arabic.pm [1] http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/morph/buckwalter.html