KenLM has switched to cmake cmake . make -j 4 But they recommend building out of tree mkdir -p build && cd build cmake .. make -j 4 If you only want the query code and do not care about compression (.gz, .bz2, and .xz): ./compile_query_only.sh Windows: The windows directory has visual studio files. Note that you need to compile the kenlm project before build_binary and ngram_query projects. OSX: Missing dependencies can be remedied with brew. brew install cmake boost eigen Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install build-essential cmake libboost-system-dev libboost-thread-dev libboost-program-options-dev libboost-test-dev libeigen3-dev zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev liblzma-dev