Text-Garden -- Text-Mining Software Tools

Text-Garden is a software library and collection of software tools for solving large scale tasks dealing with structured, semi-structured and unstructured data - emphasis of functionality is on dealing with text. It can be used in various ways covering research and applicative scenarios. Text-Garden is being used by several institutions including British Telecom, Carnegie Mellon University, Microsoft Research, Cycorp.

Some history

The development of Text-Garden started in 1996 as a set of C++ classes for dealing with text in order to perform text-learning tasks. There were two people working on it until 2002 and it was developed slowly according to the academic tasks being on our agenda. From 2003 on Text-Garden became central software platform in our research group at J. Stefan Institute. Text-Garden is used in a number of research and applicative projects (~10 people contributing).

Technical Aspects

Text Garden is almost entirely written in portable C++.

it compiles under Windows (Microsoft Visual C++, Borland C++) and Unix/Linux (GNU C)
it runs under 32bit and 64bit platforms
it consists of ~200.000 relatively compact lines of code

Using Text-Garden Functionality

Text-Garden functionality can be accessed in a number of ways:

As plain C++ classes giving complete functionality.
As DLL library of ~250 functions giving simplified extract of major functionality.
As command line utilities with ~60 command line utilities getting connected in pipeline. Basic utilities covering document classification, clustering and visualization can be downloaded under LGPL license.
Through GUI tools developed on the top of Text-Garden, including Document Atlas, OntoGen.
Through interfaces to several platforms with the same API:
- C/C++ - through simplified DLL & native C++
- Java – through JNI
- .NET – e.g. accessible through C#, VB, …
- Matlab – through standard Matlab interface
- Python – through standard Python interface
- Mathematica, Prolog, R – in preparation
The API has ~40 classes and ~250 functions. Interfaces to the all above platforms are generated automatically from the master Text-Garden header file.