Võro MCP Server

An MCP server for working with the Võro language: local dictionary and corpus lookup, GiellaLT-backed analysis/spellcheck/grammar tools, and Neurotõlge translation.

What it's for

This MCP server gives language models practical tools for working with the Võro language. Võro is a lower-resource language, so general-purpose language models may make more mistakes with it than with widely supported languages such as English, or even Estonian.

By connecting the model to dictionaries, corpus search, morphological analysis, spellchecking, grammar checking, translation, and form generation, this server helps improve the model’s ability to understand, generate, correct, and translate Võro text.

It can be useful for tasks such as Võro translation, checking and improving generated text, exploring real usage examples, generating word forms, detecting unknown words, and supporting people who are learning or working with the Võro language.

Install

On Debian/Ubuntu, one command does the whole setup.

make setup        # scripts/run_local_ubuntu.sh; see `make help` for every task

You need make, Python, and the usual shell tools installed first. The setup target installs the HFST/Divvun system binaries (adding the Apertium package repo first if your system can't already find divvun-gramcheck), downloads the SQLite datasets and the prebuilt Giella models, creates .venv, and installs the package. Smoke-test it with make test.

Manual setup

For other platforms, or to see the pieces:

1. System binaries the Giella tools shell out to: hfst-optimized-lookup, hfst-ospell, cg3, divvun-checker. On Debian/Ubuntu they come from the Apertium nightly apt repo:

   curl -fsSL https://apertium.projectjj.com/apt/install-nightly.sh | sudo bash
   sudo apt-get install -y hfst hfst-ospell cg3 divvun-gramcheck perl gawk bash

2. The package, into a virtualenv (make install):

   python3 -m venv .venv
   . .venv/bin/activate
   pip install -e .

3. Data and models, they are pulled from GitHub releases:

   scripts/fetch_data.sh
   scripts/fetch_giella.sh

4. Verify the external tools resolved (prints JSON and exits):

   vro-mcp-check

Tools

Most lookup tools accept a single word or a list for batched queries.

The open dictionary currently covers English↔Võro only.

Resources

Two Markdown grammar references are exposed over MCP:

• vro://grammar/noun-cases: noun/adjective/numeral/pronoun declension.

• vro://grammar/verb-conjugation: verb conjugation, moods, tenses, voice.

Configuration

The data lives under data/ and is fetched for you. make setup (or make data + make giella) downloads everything, so you normally configure nothing. The fetch scripts honour VRO_DATA_REPO, VRO_DATA_TAG, and VRO_GIELLA_TAG to point at a different release.

All path defaults are repo-local; override any with environment variables or a local .env where the deploy script supports it.

Point a client at it

You don't run the server yourself. The MCP client launches the vro-mcp-server binary and talks to it over stdio, so all a client needs is the binary's absolute path. Run make local-url to print that path and ready-to-paste config for Claude Code and Codex.

Claude Code:

claude mcp add vro -- /absolute/path/to/vro-mcp-server/.venv/bin/vro-mcp-server

Codex:

codex mcp add vro -- /absolute/path/to/vro-mcp-server/.venv/bin/vro-mcp-server

Generic JSON MCP client configuration:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "vro": {
      "command": "/absolute/path/to/vro-mcp-server/.venv/bin/vro-mcp-server",
      "cwd": "/absolute/path/to/vro-mcp-server"
    }
  }
}

Deployment

To host the server in the cloud so Claude or ChatGPT (the web apps) can reach it, see DEPLOY.md.

License

Code is MIT (LICENSE). The SQLite datasets are CC-BY-SA-4.0 and the prebuilt GiellaLT models are GPL-3.0. Both are distributed as separate release assets, each bundling its own license and attribution. See NOTICE.md for scope and source summaries.