FASTR Version 2.03/99-04-01
 *
 * FASt Term Recognizer
 *
 *  fastr/README
 *  Version 2.03/99-04-01
 *
 *  Copyright (C) 1998  Christian Jacquemin, LIMSI-CNRS
 *  BP 133, 91403 ORSAY, FRANCE 
 *  tel +33 (0)1 69 85 80 22 / fax -- 80 88    mailto:jacquemin@limsi.fr
 *  http://www.limsi.fr/Individu/jacquemi/  ftp://ftp.limsi.fr/pub/jacquemi/
 *
 *  This file contains a general presentaion of Fastr
 *

Overview
********

Fastr is a parser for term and variant recognition. 
Fastr take as input a corpus and a list of terms and 
ouputs the indexed corpus in which terms and variants are
recognized.

Fastr can be used in two modes:
 o controlled indexing: input consists of a corpus and
   a list of terms,
 o free indexing: input only consists of a corpus, the list
   of terms is automatically acquired from the corpus.

Fastr uses the following resources:
 o the corpus and the list of terms are tagged by the TreeTagger:
   http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/Tools/DecisionTreeTagger.html
 o if available, a list of morphological families and a list
   of semantic links are used to calculate morphological and
   semantic variation.

The formalism of Fastr is close to PATR-II.

Pointers to the User Manual
***************************

The Fastr distribution includes its own manual page. 
The manual page can be viewed by saying "nroff -man Fastr.1 | less",
"nroff -man Fastrconf.1 | less", "nroff -man Fastrlang.1 | less", 
or "nroff -man Fastrdata.1 | less".

See the online publications at 
http://www.limsi.fr/Individu/jacquemi/
for more information and examples.

Installation
************

Fastr is currently available for the following languages:
 o French,
 o English,
and for the following operating systems:
 o Linux,
 o Solaris.

To install Fastr you MUST do the following: 

 1. get the distribution of Fastr (XXXX is the name of the 
    operating system [linux|sunos|solaris]):
    fastr-XXXX.tar.gz

 2. get the linguistic resources and configuration file 
    corresponding to the desired language(s) (XX is the name
    of the language [en|fr]):
    fastr-language-XX.tar.gz

 3. excute the install-Fastr script.

 4. install the TreeTagger - or use another tagger and adapt
    the file for tag transcription lib/TAGS-TreeTagger-XX (XX is 
    the name of the language [en|fr]).

 5. test your installation for free or controlled indexing
    through the following commands (XX is the name of the 
    language [en|fr]):
    Fastr-controlled-indexing-XX text-XX.txt terms-XX.txt
    Fastr-free-indexing-XX corpus-XX.txt

Improvement
***********

You can enrich your system by adding linguistic resources:
morphological and semantic families. Scripts are provided for
creating the following resources:

    type of links | language | source database | script
    --------------+----------+-----------------+------------------
    semantic      | English  | WordNet 1.6     | WordNetPreProc.sh
    --------------+----------+-----------------+------------------
    morphological | English  | CELEX           | CelexPreProc.sh
    --------------+----------+-----------------+------------------
    semantic      | French   | Microsoft Word97| WordNetPreProc.sh
    --------------+----------+-----------------+------------------

More Information
****************

Author:
  Christian Jacquemin <jacquemin@limsi.fr>
  LIMSI-CNRS
  BP 133, 91403 ORSAY, FRANCE 
  mailto:jacquemin@limsi.fr