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+# KorAP Tokenizer
+Efficient DFA tokenizer with character offset output based on [JFlex](https://www.jflex.de/), suitable for German and other European languages. 
+
+## Description
+The KorAP tokenizer is used for the German Reference Corpus DeReKo. Being based on a finite state automaton, 
+it is not accurate as language model based tokenizers, but with ~5 billion words per hour typically more efficient.
+An important feature in the DeReKo/KorAP context is also, that it reliably reports the character offsets of the tokens 
+so that this information can be used for applying standoff annotations.
+ 
+The scanner is based on the Lucene scanner with modifications from [David Hall](https://github.com/dlwh).  
+
+Our changes mainly concern a good coverage of German abbreviations, 
+and some updates for handling computer mediated communication, optimized and tested against the gold data from the [EmpiriST 2015](https://sites.google.com/site/empirist2015/) shared task (Beißwenger et al. 2016).
+
+## Installation
+```shell script
+$ mvn clean install
+```
+#### … with changed jflex tokenizer source
+Because of the large table of abbreviations, the conversion from the jflex source to java, i.e. the calculation of the DFA, takes more than 10 minutes and requires a lot of heap space.
+
+For this reason the java source that depends on the jflex source is distributed with the source code and not deleted on `mvn clean`.
+
+If you want to modify the jflex source, while keeping the abbreviation lists, you will need ad least 10 GB of free RAM and set
+the maven option accordingly, e.g.:
+```shell script
+$ MAVEN_OPTS="-Xss600m -Xmx16000m" mvn clean install
+```
+## Documentation
+The KorAP tokenizer reads from standard input and writes to standard output. It currently supports two modes.
+
+In the default mode, the tokenizer prints all offsets of the first character of a token and the first character after a token.
+In order to end a text, flush the output and reset the character position, the magic escape sequence `\n\x03\n` .
+## Invocation Example
+```
+$ echo -n -e 'This is a text.\x0a\x03\x0aAnd this is another text.\n\x03\n' |\
+   java -jar target/KorAP-Tokenizer-1.2-SNAPSHOT.jar
+
+0 4 5 7 8 9 10 15 
+0 3 4 8 9 11 12 19 20 25 
+```
+## Development and License
+
+**Authors**: 
+* [Marc Kupietz](https://www1.ids-mannheim.de/digspra/personal/kupietz.html)
+* [Nils Diewald](https://www1.ids-mannheim.de/digspra/personal/diewald.html)
+
+Copyright (c) 2020, [Leibniz Institute for the German Language](http://www.ids-mannheim.de/), Mannheim, Germany
+
+This package is developed as part of the [KorAP](http://korap.ids-mannheim.de/)
+Corpus Analysis Platform at the Leibniz Institute for German Language
+([IDS](http://www.ids-mannheim.de/)).
+
+The package contains code from [Apache Lucene](https://lucene.apache.org/) with modifications by Jim Hall and code from 
+[Apache OpenNLP](https://opennlp.apache.org/) tools (Span class).
+
+It is published under the [Apache 2.0 License](LICENSE).
+
+## Contributions
+
+Contributions are very welcome!
+
+Your contributions should ideally be committed via our [Gerrit server](https://korap.ids-mannheim.de/gerrit/)
+to facilitate reviewing (see [Gerrit Code Review - A Quick Introduction](https://korap.ids-mannheim.de/gerrit/Documentation/intro-quick.html)
+if you are not familiar with Gerrit). However, we are also happy to accept comments and pull requests
+via GitHub.
+
+## References
+- Beißwenger, Michael / Bartsch, Sabine / Evert, Stefan / Würzner, Kay-Michael. (2016). EmpiriST 2015: A Shared Task on the Automatic Linguistic Annotation of Computer-Mediated Communication and Web Corpora. 44-56. 10.18653/v1/W16-2606.