TiMBL 7.0 (c) CLS/ILK/CLiPS 1998 - 2026
Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen
Induction of Linguistic Knowledge Research Group, Tilburg University and
Centre for Dutch Language and Speech, University of Antwerp
Website: https://languagemachines.github.io/timbl/
TiMBL is an open source software package implementing several memory-based learning algorithms, among which IB1-IG, an implementation of k-nearest neighbor classification with feature weighting suitable for symbolic feature spaces, and IGTree, a decision-tree approximation of IB1-IG. All implemented algorithms have in common that they store some representation of the training set explicitly in memory. During testing, new cases are classified by extrapolation from the most similar stored cases.
For over twenty-five years TiMBL has been mostly used in natural language processing as a machine learning classifier component, but its use extends to virtually any supervised machine learning domain. Due to its particular decision-tree-based implementation, TiMBL is in many cases far more efficient in classification than a standard k-nearest neighbor algorithm would be.
Contents of this distribution:
- Sources (C++)
- Licensing information (
COPYING) - Build system based on GNU Autotools
- Container build file (
Dockerfile) - Example data files ( in the demos directory )
- Documentation ( in the
docs/directory )
This software has been tested on:
- Modern linux distributions (combination of intel and ARM, and 32 and 64 bits)
- macOS (Intel & ARM64)
To install TiMBL, first consult whether your distribution's package manager has an up-to-date package for TiMBL. There are packages for Debian/Ubuntu, Alpine Linux and Homebrew (macOS).
To be able to succesfully build TiMBL from source, you need the following dependencies:
- A sane build environment with a C++ compiler (e.g. gcc or clang), make, autotools, libtool, pkg-config
- ticcutils
- libxml2 (install package
libxml2-devon most distributions) icu- A C++ library for Unicode and Globalization support. On Debian/Ubuntu systems, install the packagelibicu-devon most distributions.
Then build as follows:
$ bash bootstrap.sh
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install
If you want to automatically download and install the latest stable versions of
the required dependencies, then run ./build-deps.sh prior to the above. You
can pass a target directory prefix as first argument and you may need to
prepend sudo to ensure you can install there.
A Dockerfile for a container build is also available, specify --build-arg VERSION=development if you want the latest
development version instead of the production version.
See the manual in the docs/ directory.
Comments and bug-reports are welcome at our issue tracker at https://github.com/LanguageMachines/timbl/issues or by mailing lamasoftware (at) science.ru.nl. Documentation and more info may be found on https://languagemachines.github.io/timbl .
TiMBL is distributed under the GNU Public Licence v3 (see the file COPYING).