Welcome to Knorpora 1.0!

Knorpora is a modified version of the Knoppix 3.3 Live CD for students of corpus-based computational linguistics.

Like Knoppix, the Knorpora CD allows you to run a fully operational Debian/Linux operating system from the CD-ROM drive, without installing anything on the computer.

The Knorpora edition of Knoppix contains programs and data files that should be of interest to computational linguistics students (WordNet, the Natural Language Toolkit, taggers, etc.)

When you launch Knorpora on your computer, you can immediately start learning how to use a UNIX-like operating system while at the same time experimenting with the kind of UNIX-command-line-based NLP tools that make UNIX the ideal operating system for NLP work.

Even if you already work with UNIX, Knorpora may give you the chance to try some interesting software before you install it.

Documentation

The current Knorpora documentation includes the following pages:

If you are reading this documentation from inside the Knorpora CD, chances are that you will find slightly more up-to-date information in the online version.

Licenses

Knoppix and Knorpora are released under the GPL License.

Here is some information about the licenses under which the tools and data I added to Knorpora are released.

Similar Projects

Morphix-NLP is another live CD distribution targeting NLP students and practitioners.

Morphix-NLP contains a larger set of NLP tools. However, Knorpora comes with sample data (from the NLTK project), and various tools that are not in Morphix NLP (such as R and the Natural Language Toolkit).

Moreover, Morphix NLP is based on the Morphix distribution, whereas Knorpora is based on Knoppix: thus, any difference between Morphix and Knoppix will be reflected in differences between Morphix NLP and Knorpora.

TEI Knoppix is a more specialized live CD distribution for those who are interested in working with the Text Encoding Initiative standards.

Support, Contact and Future Releases

I tested Knorpora only superficially, and there will definitely be all kinds of problems.

If you experience problems with Knorpora, you can contact me (baroni AT sslmit unibo it), and I will try to help.

However, if you have problems with a specific tool, you are probably better off contacting the authors of the tool, or posting to the relevant list, and if you have general problems with the CD or the operating system, you are probably better off posting to a list where Knoppix and Linux issues are discussed.

I would like to hear from you about your Knorpora experience, suggestions for future releases, etc.

I optimistically named this release Knorpora 1.0, but I am not going to be able to release up-to-date versions on a regular basis.

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I would like to thank Klaus Knopper for inventing Knoppix and the creators of all the software I included in Knorpora.

Special thanks to the authors of the Knoppix Remastering Howto and to Sunil Thomas Thonikuzhiyil for his Knoppix Remastering Paper.

I would like to thank those who helped me with technical and logistic problems, and in particular Massimiliano Mirra, Silvia Bernardini, Sandro Raffoni and Piero Conficoni.

Last but not least, thanks to those who replied to my Corpora list Knorpora query and/or to private queries regarding Knorpora. (And sorry that I could not include all the software y'all recommended!)


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