DeepNLPF: A Framework for Integrating Third Party NLP Tools

Francisco Rodrigues, Rinaldo Lima, William Domingues, Robson Fidalgo, Adrian Chifu, Bernard Espinasse, Sébastien Fournier


Abstract
Natural Language Processing (NLP) of textual data is usually broken down into a sequence of several subtasks, where the output of one the subtasks becomes the input to the following one, which constitutes an NLP pipeline. Many third-party NLP tools are currently available, each performing distinct NLP subtasks. However, it is difficult to integrate several NLP toolkits into a pipeline due to many problems, including different input/output representations or formats, distinct programming languages, and tokenization issues. This paper presents DeepNLPF, a framework that enables easy integration of third-party NLP tools, allowing the user to preprocess natural language texts at lexical, syntactic, and semantic levels. The proposed framework also provides an API for complete pipeline customization including the definition of input/output formats, integration plugin management, transparent ultiprocessing execution strategies, corpus-level statistics, and database persistence. Furthermore, the DeepNLPF user-friendly GUI allows its use even by a non-expert NLP user. We conducted runtime performance analysis showing that DeepNLPF not only easily integrates existent NLP toolkits but also reduces significant runtime processing compared to executing the same NLP pipeline in a sequential manner.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.895
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
7244–7251
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.895
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Francisco Rodrigues, Rinaldo Lima, William Domingues, Robson Fidalgo, Adrian Chifu, Bernard Espinasse, and Sébastien Fournier. 2020. DeepNLPF: A Framework for Integrating Third Party NLP Tools. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 7244–7251, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
DeepNLPF: A Framework for Integrating Third Party NLP Tools (Rodrigues et al., LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.895.pdf