For more information, see http://gmb.let.rug.nl/elephant/about.php To install elephant simply type $ make ; make install this will compile the external tools wapiti and elman and copy the executables files in /usr/local/bin . To change the destination directory the variable PREFIX in the Makefile has to be edited. After installation, elephant is invoked like in these examples: (PTB-style output) $ echo 'Good morning Mr. President.' | elephant -m models/english (IOB output format) $ echo 'Good morning Mr. President.' | elephant -m models/english -f iob It is also possible to run elephant from the source directory without need to install it, by just typing $ make and invoking the executable from the current directory, e.g. $ echo 'Good morning Mr. President.' | ./elephant -m models/english/ Included in the distribution there are the models for sentence and word boundary detection of English, Dutch and Italian.