A few hours ago, I tried to install simon-0.2-beta-1-win32.exe. The installation was successful, but I wasn’t able to start Simon. Now I tried a different way. First, I started ‘H:\Program Files\simon 0.2\bin\kbuildsycoca4.exe‘, and then I started Simon 0.2 in the Windows start menu. And now it worked.
Simon version 0.2-beta-1
I am interested to know whether it is possible to import the German PLS dictionary (this version has been formatted with XSLT). Let’s take a look at the following screenshot:
It should be possible to import the German PLS lexicon.
In Simon version 0.1, it wasn’t possible to import a PLS lexicon. That is an improvement. After pressing the next button, you are asked to provide the PLS/XML dictionary.
Obviously, other dictionaries provide information about terminals of the words. What does this mean? Why would it be useful to provide terminals?
Import a PLS dictionary
In my opinion, it would be useful if such a dictionary would be an integral part of Simon (without the need to download and import it). I want to get started as fast as possible. And I would like to see some results. But it is getting better and better. Version 0.2 seems to be easier to handle than version 0.1. You don’t have to ask for the HADIFIX-BOMP from the University of Bonn. You can just take the German PLS dictionary. Will it work? The German pronunciation dictionary contains a lot of special characters (ä,ö,ü,ß; IPA-symbols). Well, I will see.
Let’s take a look at the encoding of the German PLS dictionary. It is UTF-8. I hope that this character encoding will be OK. Keep in mind: character encoding is a major issue when it comes to non-ASCII characters. I don’t like these problems. But they seem to occur on a regular basis (this applies to languages like Spanish as well).
Well, I think that I will save the German PLS lexicon. I have just done that. Now I have to import it. On my computer, it has the path ‘H:/Documents and Settings/xpprof32/My Documents/200812/german.xml‘. Let’s see whether it will work out. I am now pressing the next button. Simon indicates that the dictionary has been imported successfully.
I just marked the option to include unused words from the shadow lexicon:
Obviously, the German PLS dictionary has become the shadow lexicon
And I think that the IPA symbols have been transformed into ASCII characters. That is really great. Why is that great? Because it is pretty comfortable to create a pronunciation dictionary using IPA symbols. They are pretty good readable by the human eye. But the computer needs ASCII characters. Obviously, Simon transforms the IPA symbols into ASCII characters automatically.
Simon indicates that the category is unknown. And at the moment, the recognition rate of all the words is zero. Of course, I haven’t tried to do some recognition yet.
Let’s stop here. I was able to start Simon version 0.2 (after starting kbuildsycoca4.exe). And I was able to import the German PLS dictionary.