[infomap-nlp-announce] Release of infomap-nlp version 0.8.6

[Dominic W. <wi...@ma...>]

Dear Infomap Users,

We are pleased to announce the long-awaited (even if not much-awaited!) 
version 0.8.6 of the Infomap NLP software.

The main changes from version 0.8.5 are greater flexibility to handle 
different character sets (thanks to Viktor Tron), and a few bug fixes 
and enhancements that should improve overall performance and stability.

In more detail, the changes are as follows:

- To extend the coverage of different character sets, infomap-build now 
reads a "valid chars" file, which contains all the characters to be 
treated as alphabetic by this model. There is a default 
"valid_chars.en" file for English shipped with the release.

- The vector output functionality (associate -f FILENAME) has been 
fixed, and so the option to output search results to a file should work 
now.

- In the svd interface, myutils.c has been changed so that the memory 
allocation works for 32 and 64 bit machines.

- The default admin/install.control file has been altered so that 
infomap-install works automatically for more db formats (even though 
this means it gives more error warnings as well).

The version has been tested for single-file corpora on Linux, Solaris, 
BSD / OSX, and Windows / Cygwin platforms. infomap-build works on all 
of these, infomap-install still appeasr to have problems on Solaris.

There are several further enhancements that we would like to make, in 
particular, adding the web interface and some of the other tools that 
are described in Infomap papers and used in the online demos, but never 
made it into the release. Also, it would be great to build in some of 
the GUI developments that other list members have made.

Hopefully, getting a new more stable release out there will be a big 
step in the right direction, especially since it's forced Scott and 
myself to get to grips once more with autoconf, automake, and some of 
the other gruesome incantations that go into releasing new versions of 
software.

Finally, I'm generally much more responsive to this MAYA e-mail address 
(wi...@ma...), so those of you who have my CSLI old address in 
your address books may wish to update.

Much graitude to everyone who has helped find bugs, fix bugs, and keep 
the Infomap software alive and circulating and useful to people. Just 
from my own contacts, we now have users from as far afield as medical 
informatics, the intelligence community, and cultural anthropology, as 
well as a good bunch of computational linguistics stalwarts. Thanks, 
folks.

Best wishes,
Dominic