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SCTK, the NIST Scoring Toolkit

File: README.md

Date: October 28, 2021

SCTK Version: 2.4.12

This directory contains SCTK, the NIST Scoring Toolkit. SCTK contains the source code, documentation and example data for the following programs:

• sclite V2.10 - "Score Lite",
• sc_stats V1.3 - sclite's Statistical Significance Comparison tool
• rover V0.1 - Recognition Output Voting Error Reduction
• asclite V1.11 - Multidimensional alignment replacement for sclite

SCTK Basic Installation

To install compile and install sctk, from the main directory type the commands:

% make config
% make all
% make check
% make install
% make doc

The make config command executes the script config.sh in the src/sclite directory and initialized the makefiles in the rest of the src directories.

You can specify installation directory by changing the PREFIX variable in the src/makefile file. By default, all executables will be installed in bin of this directory. Be sure to add the installation directory to your PATH variable in order to access the programs.

The make all command will compile all toolkit executables and libraries. Compilation of rfilter1 may fail if your version of libC is very new because it now includes the strcmp* family of functions. You can use the libC versions, and avoid compilation complaints, by following the instructions in src/rfilter1/makefile.

The make check will perform self tests on the toolkit. Please report any problems to Jon Fiscus at NIST with any bug reports or comments at the email address jonathan.fiscus@nist.gov. Please include the version number and any other relevant information such as OS, compiler, etc.

The make install command will copy the executables to $PREFIX (see make config above.)

UNIX-style manual pages and HTML formatted manuals are provided in the doc directory.

Bundled Software

This version of SCTK includes the CMU-Cambridge Statistical Language Modeling Toolkit v2. Included in STCK is the complete source code tree and documentation. The toolkit has been included so that SCLITE can use a language model to compute conditional word weights for word-weighted scoring.

Optional Software/Notes:

sclite: To use the interactive installation for sclite, edit the file src/sclite/config.sh at line 36, set the user_interaction=1 it will ask you during the configuration (make config) if you want to use GNU diff instead of sclite and CMU-Cambridge SLM for sclite. Those choices are not recommended and not used anymore.

sclite has the ability to use GNU's diff utility as an alternate string alignment method. The installer has the choice whether or not to include this ability in the compiled version.

GNU diff: If the use of GNU's diff is desired, you will need GNU's diff utility from their diffutils distribution (version 2.7). If you cannot locate this distribution, a copy is available at ftp://jaguar.ncsl.nist.gov/pub/diffutils-2.7.tar. When you install diff, make sure the executable is installed as gdiff, gnudiff or diffgnu (config.sh expects it to be called one of these).

Special Note to SGI owners: When installing GNU's diff make sure to call it gnudiff or diffgnu. If you use gdiff the executable name may be overshadowed by a pre-existing executable.

utf_filt: utf_filt is using SGML external software and modules like SGMLS perl module and nsgmls program which have been updated and continued: OpenSP (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=2115&package_id=2869). Version v1.5.2 of OpenSP have been tested and working with the current version of utf_filt.

Special Note to Cygwin users: it has been reported that compilation of rfilter1 can fail in some case, please read the OPTIONS part of the rfilter1/makefile and adapt accordingly before retrying compilation.

64 bits Compilation: With big alignments, sctk needs to be compiled in 64 bits. By default, the C/C++ software are compiled in 32 bits with the options (-Os) but can be compiled in 64 bits. To do so, -m64 is added to the CFLAGS variable in src/asclite/core/makefile, src/asclite/test/makefile, src/rfilter1/makefile and src/sclite/makefile.

Example of CFLAGS for OSX 10.4+: -fast -m64 -arch x86_64 -arch ppc64

Known to compile on:

The distribution was initially written in ANSI C on a SUN Workstation. To date, the code has been successfully compiled and tested on the following platforms:

[*] compiled with warning messages, but successful self test

[**] compiled and ran, but test6, which uses GNU's diff for alignment fails. The use of DIFF for alignment is rarely used and the failure can be safely ignored.

Docker

A Dockerfile is included to build and use SCTK without compiling the codebase for your particular platform.

To build:

docker build -t sctk .

Hypothesis Test

To run sclite on a reference file and hypothesis file, you need to map a volume to your host.

Linux or a Mac:

docker run -it -v $PWD:/var/sctk sctk sclite -i wsj -r ref.txt -h hyp.txt

Windows:

docker run -it -v /myhostpath:/var/sctk sctk sclite -i wsj -r ref.txt -h hyp.txt

sc_stats

To run more advanced features of the SDK, shell into the container with a volume mapped to your local files:

docker run -it -v $PWD:/var/sctk sctk sh
/var/sctk #

Then run sclite piped to sc_stats:

sclite -i wsj -r ref.txt -h hyp1.txt -h hyp2.txt -o sgml stdout | sc_stats -p -t mapsswe -u
sc_stats: 1.3
Beginning Multi-System comparisons and reports
    Performing the Matched Pair Sentence Segment (Word Error) Test
    Printing Unified Statistical Test Reports
        Output written to 'Ensemble.stats.unified'

Successful Completion

Contact

If you have questions, please address them to Jonathan Fiscus at jonathan.fiscus@nist.gov

License

See LICENSE.md for details or http://www.nist.gov/open/license.cfm