Abstract
Natural Language processing (NLP) systems are typically characterized by a pipeline architecture in which several independently developed NLP tools, connected as a chain of filters, apply successive transformations to the data that flows through the system. Hence when integrating such tools, one may face problems that lead to information losses, such as: (i) tools discard information from their input which will be required by other tools further along the pipeline; (ii) each tool has its own input/output format.
This work proposes a solution that solves these problems. We offer a framework for NLP systems. The systems built using this framework use a client server architecture, in which the server acts as a blackboard where all tools add/consult data. Data is kept in the server under a conceptual model independent of the client tools, thus allowing the representation of a broad range of linguistic information.
The tools interact with the server through a generic API which allows the creation of new data and the navigation through all the existing data. Moreover, we provide libraries implemented in several programming language that abstract the connection and communication protocol details between the tools and the server, and provide several levels of functionality that simplify server use.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bird, S., Day, D., Garofolo, J., Henderson, J., Laprun, C., Liberman, M.: Atlas: A flexible and extensible architecture for linguistic annotation (2000)
Bird, S., Liberman, M.: A formal framework for linguistic annotation. Technical Report MS-CIS-99-01, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1999)
Bontcheva, K., Tablan, V., Maynard, D., Cunningham, H.: Evolving GATE to Meet New Challenges in Language Engineering. Natural Language Eng. 10(3/4), 349–373 (2004)
de Matos, D.M.M.: Construção de Sistemas de Geração Automática de Língua Natural. PhD thesis, IST - UTL (July 2005)
Fowler, M.: Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, November 2002. Addison-Wesley Professional, Reading (2002)
Ide, N., Romary, L., de la., E.: International standard for a linguistic annotation framework (2003)
Lee, H., Maeda, K., Ma, X., Bird, S.: The Annotation Graphs Toolkit (Version 1.0): Application Developer’s Manual. Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania (January 2002)
Loper, E., Bird, S.: Nltk: The natural language toolkit. In: CoRR, cs.CL/0205028 (2002)
Petersen, U.: Emdros - a text database engine for analyzed or annotated text. In: Colling (2004)
Taylor, P., Black, A., Caley, R.: The architecture of the the festival speech synthesis system (1998)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Graça, J., Mamede, N.J., Pereira, J.D. (2006). A Framework for Integrating Natural Language Tools. In: Vieira, R., Quaresma, P., Nunes, M.d.G.V., Mamede, N.J., Oliveira, C., Dias, M.C. (eds) Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language. PROPOR 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3960. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11751984_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11751984_12
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-34045-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-34046-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)