Re: [tlug] Japanese morphological analyzers (Was: Places where to apply to for a technical internship?)

[Drew Poulin <poulin@example.com>]

On Sep 11, 2014, at 3:39 PM, Jim Breen <jimbreen@example.com> wrote:

>> Apparently the Unidic license prohibits redistribution, so it probably won’t be used with Kuromoji/Lucene/Solr:
>> 
>> https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-4056
> 
> A couple of question come to mind:
> 
> - I wonder whether they asked the UniDic people is it was OK to to use
> it in Lucene.
> 

Sure couldn’t hurt.

>> The license also prohibits commercial use without the permission of the copyright holders (営利を目的として，UniDic ver.1.3.12 を利用する場合は，事前に著作権者と協議すること。)
> 
> Again, I wonder if they asked.

Indeed.  Christian Moen, the Kuromoji developer, may have interpreted the restrictions a bit too strictly when he said UniDic "requires a license for commercial use.”  The  Japanese line above says only that that the copyright holders need to be consulted first.

>> I’m curious about how others use open-source Japanese morphological analyzers with open-source databases.
> 
> I charge on with MeCab/UniDic, but then I'm neither redistributing nor
> running a commercial
> operation.

Thanks for that.  I would like to leave open the possibility of commercial use.

>> Is there some widely preferred combination that I haven’t found yet?  I know the big boys like Google and Yahoo use Basis Technology’s Rosette, but that’s a bit rich for my blood.
> 
> Errm. Dunno about Yahoo, but Google dropped use of Basis's
> morphological analyzer
> in favour of an in-house developed system about 7-8 years ago.

That’s interesting.  Basis still has Google’s logo on its website (http://www.basistech.com), but maybe now Google is using a Basis product other than the morphological analyzer.  The page that the logo links to reveals nothing about what Basis is doing for Google  (http://www.basistech.com/case-studies/).

Drew