annotation/translation/pinyin conversion -- new Adso release

[trevelyan]

A new version of Adso is available for download. It performs Chinese-English annotation, gist translation, and hanzi-to-pinyin conversion. The software is open source and can be adapted for other Chinese computing needs as well (text analysis, flashcard generation, etc.).

Download: http://www.adsotrans.com

Major differences:

(1) A major overhaul of the existing code base. The new software is more object-oriented and consistent in its handling of similar objects. Information on their inheritance hierarchy is available:

http://www.adsotrans.com/class_hierarchy.txt

(2) Sentence-level grammar analysis. Grammar rules may be added, modified or disabled by changing a single file ("subgrammar.txt").

Cosmetic differences:

(1) HTML popup mode for text-annotation (thanks Roddy!)

(2) Optional capitalization of proper names and terminated sentences.

(3) More command-line choices

(4) A larger dictionary size (125,000) with over 20,000 words unique to this project.

(5) Expanded grammar recognition of a number of classes, including Chinese place names, directional complements, determiners, and more.

NOTE: The web interface is unchanged, so many new features are only available when running the program from the command line. Anyone interested in using the older version or the Windows dictionary should probably grab the latest dictionary files from the development release. I'm not likely to update these files as regularly as I do the main distribution.