The Linguistica Project
Alchemist

The original purpose of Alchemist is to allow you to read in raw text files and create morphological gold-standards in XML format. Using Alchemist, you can identify morphemes, along with a number of important characteristics of the morphemes, such as whether they are roots or affixes, the degree of analyst certainty, and allomorphs of the morpheme.

Alchemist is also a good general tool for sorting and filtering lists of words, because it allows the user to easily use regular expressions applied to words.

Documentation

Alchemist documentation (2.0) (pdf)

Creating Morphological Descriptions with Alchemist (pdf)

Downloads

You can download the executable of version 3.0 here.

All executable and source code downloads are now available on the iBridge Network.

To run this program in Windows, you must have the proper Qt libraries in the same directory as the executable or in your computer's execution path. If you don't know how to set the path, download the file to your C:\Windows\ directory or the same directory that includes the executable.

qt-mtnc321.dll

License

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Reviews in LINGUIST List

Read reviews of Alchemist 2.0 in LINGUIST List:

Oliver Streiter - April 21, 2006
Stephen Grimes - May 1, 2006

Thank you Mr. Streiter and Mr. Grimes for the helpful reviews. We plan to implement your suggestions in future versions.


Clarifications of Mr. Streiter's Review

GOLD Ontology
Mr. Streiter mentions that the GOLD ontology is used in Alchemist 2.0.5. This is not correct, but Alchemist 3.0 does have most of the GOLD ontology built into the feature list available for morphemes.

Unicode
The review also stated that Alchemist 2.0.5 could not read Unicode. We should clarify that version 2.0.5 does read UTF-16 encodings, but does not read UTF-8. Never fear! Alchemist 3.0 does support UTF-8 encoding. If you would like to use Alchemist 2.0.5 with a UTF-8 encoded file, you can change the file to UTF-16 in Windows by opening the file in Notepad and changing the "Encoding:" field of the "Save As" dialog to "Unicode." It will be saved as a UTF-16 file.




Alchemist List

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https://listhost.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo/alchemist

Alchemist was created by Colin Sprague and Yu Hu.