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Page last modified: Tuesday 2nd November 2021
The user guide is available for general guidance on using the tool, if the answer to your question is not available there or here then please contact me.
Can VARD 2 be used on operating systems other than Windows?
Yes, because VARD 2 is built using Java, it can be run on most operating systems. However, you will need to ensure you have the latest version of Java installed. If using a Mac, Java is often setup to use Java 5, this can be rectified by following the instructions in the bugs section.
Can VARD 2 be used to process other languages than English?
Yes, but a little work will be needed to achieve this. Firstly, a modern equivalent word list will be required for the language you are using. You will also find that many of the word/letter replacement rules are based on Early Modern English. These are likely to be of no use in other languages, so can be replaced with your own rules if available. Extra training of the tool will be required so that it can learn which of its methods are most successful. Guidelines for editing the required files are available in the user guide. In the future it is hoped that VARD will learn new letter replacement rules "on the fly".
Can abbreviations be marked as variants so that they can be normalised, including the period (e.g. "bro.", "lo.", "K.")?
It is a little tricky as it is hard to distinguish between periods as abbreviations and as sentence breaks. If you change your input word pattern to (new part in bold):
(?:\p{L}\p{M}*|[\'\-\^~=]|\.(?!\s\p{Lu}))+
This will include periods as part of words, as long as the period is not followed by a space and capital letter. This should deal with most cases, whilst not including sentence breaking periods.
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