The Language Application Grid

AbstractThe Language Application (LAPPS) Grid project is establishing a framework that enables language service discovery, composition, and reuse and promotes sustainability, manageability, usability, and interoperability of natural language Processing (NLP) components. It is based on the service-oriented architecture (SOA), a more recent, web-oriented version of the “pipeline” architecture that has long been used in NLP for sequencing loosely-coupled linguistic analyses. The LAPPS Grid provides access to basic NLP processing tools and resources and enables pipelining such tools to create custom NLP applications, as well as composite services such as question answering and machine translation together with language resources such as mono- and multi-lingual corpora and lexicons that support NLP. The transformative aspect of the LAPPS Grid is that it orchestrates access to and deployment of language resources and processing functions available from servers around the globe and enables users to add their own language resources, services, and even service grids to satisfy their particular needs.