macOS
brew install yamchalocal Homebrew formula metadata
sudo port install yamchaMacPorts ports tree · textproc/yamcha/Portfile · source: api.github.com
brew
NLP text chunker using Support Vector Machines. Version 0.33 via Homebrew; verified from local package data.
install
brew install yamchalocal Homebrew formula metadata
sudo port install yamchaMacPorts ports tree · textproc/yamcha/Portfile · source: api.github.com
overview
NLP text chunker using Support Vector Machines
history
YamCha, Yet Another Multipurpose CHunk Annotator, is Taku Kudo's open-source text chunker built around support vector machines. It belongs to the pre-deep-learning generation of NLP packages where feature templates, chunk encodings, and SVM training pipelines were packaged as reusable command-line tools.
The official YamCha page describes it as a generic, customizable text chunker for POS tagging, named-entity recognition, base noun phrase chunking, and text chunking. It says the system used support vector machines and was the same system that performed best in the CoNLL-2000 shared task and a BaseNP chunking task.
The YamCha news log records an initial 0.1 release in July 2001, followed by a steady 2002-2005 sequence that added multi-class strategies, memory savings for large models, C API support, PKE acceleration, experimental Perl/Python/Ruby modules, 64-bit support, and bug fixes. The project page was last revised in late 2005, matching the period when SVM chunkers were a mainstream statistical NLP approach.
YamCha's adoption came through NLP research and language-processing pipelines rather than general developer tooling. The companion ACL paper, Chunking with Support Vector Machines, connects the software to the 2001 NAACL work by Kudo and Matsumoto and to the then-current practice of comparing chunkers on shared tasks.
The package remained relevant in Unix package managers because it bundled training and decoding commands plus a C/C++ library around TinySVM-era models. For users maintaining older NLP experiments, YamCha is a reproducibility and compatibility artifact as much as a current modeling choice.
Typical use is to prepare token-per-line training or test data with feature columns and chunk labels, train a model with YamCha's template-driven SVM pipeline, and run the `yamcha` decoder or `yamcha-mkmodel` tooling. The official documentation emphasizes feature windows, parsing direction, pairwise versus one-vs-rest multiclass strategies, partial chunking, and model conversion for faster classification.
YamCha is historically significant because it packages a specific research-era NLP method into a reusable Unix tool. It sits beside ChaSen, TinySVM, CaboCha, CRF++, and MeCab in Taku Kudo's ecosystem of compact Japanese/NLP-oriented C and C++ tools that escaped academia into package managers.
security posture
narrow executable package without higher-risk signals.
green risk · low confidence · appliance
Before unattended agent use, check whether the tool reads plaintext credentials, writes remote state, publishes artifacts, or shells out to plugins.
executables
| Command | Kind | Exposure | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
yamcha | cli | global executable | |
yamcha-config | cli | global executable | |
yamcha-mkmodel | cli | global executable |
freshness
These signals separate page generation age, package-manager activity, and upstream release comparison. Version lag is warned only when an evidence URL and comparable versions are present.
http://chasen.org/~taku/software/yamcha/
install metadata
| Package key | brew:yamcha |
|---|---|
| Version | 0.33 |
| Package manager | Homebrew |
| Package manager page | https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/yamcha |
| Homepage | http://chasen.org/~taku/software/yamcha/ |
| Upstream docs | http://chasen.org/~taku/software/yamcha |
| License | LGPL-2.1-or-later |
| Source archive | https://deb.debian.org/debian/pool/main/y/yamcha/yamcha_0.33.orig.tar.gz |
| Dependencies | tinysvm |
| Build dependencies | automake |
| Bottle | available (on arm64_big_sur, arm64_linux, arm64_monterey, arm64_sequoia, arm64_sonoma, arm64_tahoe, arm64_ventura, big_sur, catalina, monterey, sonoma, ventura, x86_64_linux) |
| Homebrew post-install | not defined |
| Service | none declared |
registry facts
| Source Database | Homebrew formula API |
|---|---|
| Tap | homebrew/core |
| Full Name | yamcha |
| Version Scheme | 0 |
| Revision | 0 |
| Bottle Stable Root URL | https://ghcr.io/v2/homebrew/core |
| Deprecated | no |
| Disabled | no |
| Keg Only | no |
| URL Keys |
|
source database matches
Matches are pulled from external package-manager indexes and kept separate from local Automic Vault package links.
yamcha
sudo port install yamchasource trail
This page is generated by av-web from the private package SQLite artifact built by scripts/generate-pkg-sqlite.py.
View the package source record on GitHub.