Utool: The Swiss Army Knife of Underspecification

Project status: Utool is no longer under active development. The most recent release is Utool 3.4 and is available from the GitHub releases page.

Project description

Utool is a tool that performs various tasks related to scope underspecification, a particular technique in computational semantics of natural language. It implements a solver for underspecified descriptions, converts between various underspecification formalisms, and performs a variety of helper jobs.

Utool is implemented in Java. It can be used as a command-line tool, via a GUI, or as a server. It is distributed under the GPL.

Utool was created within the CHORUS project at Saarland University. The primary developers are Alexander Koller, Stefan Thater, and Michaela Regneri, with help by Marco Kuhlmann.

How to get started

Download a packaged version of Utool from the releases page. The manual includes a tutorial and documents the command-line tool, server, graphical workbench, and supported codecs.

To build Utool from source, you will need Apache Maven and Java JDK 8 or newer:

git clone https://github.com/coli-saar/utool.git
cd utool
mvn install assembly:single

The build produces target/utool-<version>-jar-with-dependencies.jar. Run it with:

java -jar target/utool-<version>-jar-with-dependencies.jar

Documentation

The Utool manual describes the graphical workbench, command-line and server modes, input and output codecs, integration with other tools, and the technical background. The API documentation covers the Java packages, classes, and methods. Both are rebuilt from the sources in this repository.