Step 3: Development Tools and Building a Lexical Model

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We recommend using Keyman Developer to build lexical models because the IDE has many features that will make lexical model development a lot easier.

Keyman Developer has a project wizard that makes it easier to manage the lexical model projects. Each lexical model in the repository will have an associated Keyman Project .kpj file that can be built from the Keyman Developer IDE. This project file is the starting point for any work you do on a lexical model.

Make sure you have Keyman Developer 12.0 or later. You can download Keyman Developer from https://keyman.com/developer{target="_blank"}. With Keyman Developer, you will have these two ways of building lexical models.

Building lexical models in the IDE

Double-click a .kpj file in Explorer to open the project in the Keyman Developer Integrated Development Environment (IDE). You can also open a project from the Project menu within the IDE. The project is automatically updated when you make changes, and changes specific to your computer are saved in a .kpj.user file along with the .kpj file. This .kpj.user file can be deleted at any time, and should not be saved to the git repository.

In the Project screen, in either the Models or the Packages tab, you can click Build all to build all the models and package files listed in the project. Keyman Developer does not resolve project dependencies at this time (see the command line details below for an automatic way to resolve this).

Building lexical models from the command line

At the root of the lexical-models repo is a build.sh bash script you can use to compile the lexical model and package in the project.

The script is intended to be run from the bash shell. On Windows, Git Bash is installed along with Git and is the recommended build environment (Windows Subsystem for Linux is not currently supported). On macOS and Linux, the compiler requires WINE. Here are some of the additional build script parameters:

      -t          runs tests on models
      -b          creates compiled models
      -c          clean the folder (deletes all intermediate and
                  output files, do this before committing with git)
      -no-npm     skip all npm steps
      -s          build silently
      -h          get help on build.sh
       [target]   The specific model(s) to build. e.g. release or release/nrc/nrc.en.mtnt
                  If omitted, builds all models

In this guide, we'll primarily use the English MTNT lexical model located in

c:\projects\lexical-models\nrc\nrc.en.mtnt

From the Git Bash command prompt, we build our lexical model.

Note: Commands in Git Bash follow Unix-style file paths.

cd /c/projects/lexical-models
./build.sh release/nrc/nrc.en.mtnt

Step 4: Organizing the Lexical Model Files