RACAI’s Linguistic Web Services
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2008)
Abstract
Nowadays, there are hundreds of Natural Language Processing applications and resources for different languages that are developed and/or used, almost exclusively with a few but notable exceptions, by their creators. Assuming that the right to use a particular application or resource is licensed by the rightful owner, the user is faced with the often not so easy task of interfacing it with his/her own systems. Even if standards are defined that provide a unified way of encoding resources, few are the cases when the resources are actually coded in conformance to the standard (and, at present time, there is no such thing as general NLP application interoperability). Semantic Web came with the promise that the web will be a universal medium for information exchange whatever its content. In this context, the present article outlines a collection of linguistic web services for Romanian and English, developed at the Research Institute for AI for the Romanian Academy (RACAI) which are ready to provide a standardized way of calling particular NLP operations and extract the results without caring about what exactly is going on in the background.