Integration of Workflow and Pipeline for Language Service Composition

Abstract

Integrating language resources and language services is a critical part of building natural language processing applications. Service workflow and processing pipeline are two approaches for sharing and combining language resources. Workflow languages focus on expressive power of the languages to describe variety of workflow patterns to meet users’ needs. Users can combine those language services in service workflows to meet their requirements. The workflows can be accessible in distributed manner and can be invoked independently of the platforms. However, workflow languages lack of pipelined execution support to improve performance of workflows. Whereas, the processing pipeline provides a straightforward way to create a sequence of linguistic processing to analyze large amounts of text data. It focuses on using pipelined execution and parallel execution to improve throughput of pipelines. However, the resulting pipelines are standalone applications, i.e., software tools that are accessible only via local machine and that can only be run with the processing pipeline platforms. In this paper we propose an integration framework of the two approaches so that each offests the disadvantages of the other. We then present a case study wherein two representative frameworks, the Language Grid and UIMA, are integrated.

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