Collaborative Development of Interactive Language Processing Tools
Paul Klint · Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science · 2001
Many research groups are developing software tools as part of their research. In many cases, it is hard to integrate tools developed by different groups into new, interactive, applications. This talk focuses on the question how tools in the area of language definition and language processing could be developed in a collaborative fashion. In the first part of the talk, the basic infra-structural needs for such an approach are described: how to represent data, how to coordinate the operation of tools, how to identify the necessary common services? In the second part of the talk, I will sketch our own experience with collaborative development of language processing tools in the ASF+SDF Meta-Environment [2]. Key ingredients are Annotated Terms (ATerms) [3] for exchanging data and the ToolBus [1] for coordinating tools. The presentation ends with open questions: is it desirable and possible to create an infrastructure that really enables the collaborative development of language processing tools across different research groups? If so, what needs to be done to achieve this?