Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Kakasi-java: born again

The Japanese language has several symbols, including kanji and hiragana/katakana. In software, we sometimes need to switch a text from one system to the other, and it is difficult.

Kakasi and MeCab are Open Source libraries dedicated to the problem of converting kanji to hiragana or katakana. For instance they can transform "国際財務報告基準" to "こくさいざいむほうこくきじゅん" or even to "kokusaizaimuhoukokukijun". In clear, it transforms logograms (symbols with multiple possible readings) to syllables.
That is very tricky, because for instance "経緯" can be transformed to "keii", but also to "ikisatsu" depending on the context or speaker. Kakasi sometimes gets it wrong, but usually it is not that bad. MeCab is actually better at that.

Yesterday I decided to add a "furigana" feature to my Android flashcards app. Furigana helps people read difficult kanjis, they are used a lot in mass media: books, newspapers, signs, advertisements.
Kakasi and MeCab are both conversion tools, but their internal algorithms are very different, leading to different speed/quality/simplicity characteristics. Before running to MeCab, I decided to also give Kakasi a try.

Unfortunately, Kakasi is written in C, and thus not easy to run on Android. Porting from C to Java would be possible, but before doing it I had to make sure nobody had ported it already. After multiple searches, I finally found a tar file of the blog of Kenichi Maehashi, saying "現在どこからも入手できないようです". In clear: Kakasi-java can not be found anymore on the Internet, so he uploaded the 0.4 version he miraculously found in his backups.

To make improvements and fixes possible, I took the source, compiled, tested it, wrote a little README file and created a project for it on GitHub. Code contributions are welcome :-)

The best would be a Java port of MeCab, but that does not seem to exist. MeCab has a Java binding, but it is not 100% Java, requiring JNI calls, which is not a great idea for Android.
Nicolas Raoul

Monday, January 30, 2012

Templated nodes in Alfresco 4


In the new Alfresco 4, you can now easily use document templates.
Templates are convenient for forms that employees must fill often, for instance.
Another example: here at Aegif we often write new contracts, always based on the same template.
In this article I explain how to create and use a template in Alfresco.
First log in Alfresco Share as admin, and click the repository icon:
Go to the "Data dictionary" folder, then "Node templates" folder, and upload your template:


That's all!
To use it, click "Create content..." then "By Templated Node...", and you can select a template:


The template is then copied to the current folder, and you just have to rename it.

More technical details:

  • Can be used to easily create nodes with a custom content model.
  • Convenient for nodes with a particular set of aspects and properties.
  • Node templates must me created by an administrator (or someone who has access to the data dictionary), and are usable by everyone.
  • I haven't tried but I guess you can use permissions to show a particular template only to a particular group of users.
  • I will have to check whether associations are preserved or not.
  • As I reported on JIRA, folder hierarchies can not be used as templated nodes yet.
Do you know any trick with templated nodes? Let us know in the comments :-)
Nicolas Raoul

Keywords: Créer un contenu... A partir d'un modèle. Inhlat erstellen... Nach Mustervorlagen-Node. Crear contenido... Por nodo de plantilla. Crea contenuto... Per nodo modello. 親近コンテンツ… テンプレートノード