My implementation of Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA) library that we used at KMi, Open University to produce our submission at the NTCIR-9 CrossLink task. 

== WARNING ==
The tool is verified to yield good results (meaning correlation with human judgement as reported in the original ESA paper) with the provided prebuilt English Wikipedia ESA background from 2005. I have not had success building the ESA background from the recent dumps of Wikipedia. Please let me know if you manage.

== Changelog ==
7.12.2013
 - fixed a few mistakes in the tutorial
 - merged pull request fixing a problem on MacOS

15.2.2013
 - found out about problem with stemming - the example english background is stemmed by PorterStemmer, but my library uses SnowballStemmer; this results in a lot of OOV words and therefore low similarity scores
 - added interactive mode to the analyzer - now you can pipe-in pairs of texts to compare (1 line = 1 text) and ESAAnalyzer produces the similarity scores
 - added wikixray scripts that were missing from the tutorial

7.10.2012 
 - fixed a typo in analyzer bash script, causing only the first words to be analyzed; fixed handling of oov words; removed length filter (only words 3-100 chars long were considered)

29.9.2012
 - added support for SQLite, so that the library is better usable for fast prototyping

25.3.2012
 - initial release

== Files ==
 - /example - see example data in /example where you can find an ESA background built from Wikipedia snapshot from 2005, and directly use it in our tools for assessing semantic similarity of English textis/words.

 - /tutorial - basic instructions for building your own background

 - /lib - Java libraries required to run


== So how to get ESA running in 2 minutes for English? ==
0.
        # git co https://github.com/ticcky/esalib.git
        # cd esalib

1. Create a symbolic link to the sample database
        # ln -s example/esa_en.db esa_db.db

2. Get relatedness estimate of two texts:
        # ./run_analyzer "computer" "apple"


Please don't hessitate to get in touch if you want to use my library but have troubles with it.