Web Service Exchange Protocols for Language Processing ISO TC37 SC4 WG1 Potsdam,Germany March

Where we are US project funded by NSF for LAPPS (Language Applications) o Infrastructure to support composition of web services for language processing o Developing sophisticated evaluation mechanisms o Partners: Brandeis University, Vassar College, Carnegie-Mellon University, University of Pennsylvania (LDC) Web service infrastructure also a part of several European projects o PANACEA, CLARIN, the METAs Meeting in Istabul (LREC), May 2012 established a group of collaborators from US, Europe, Asia, Australia o Agreed to federate grids to provide universal access

Pisa Meeting Meeting in Pisa, October 2012 to set up a New Work Item (NWI) within ISO TC37 SC4 WG1 to develop a standard set of exchange protocols o Objects that are parameters for NLP tools Several projects reported on their practices o Some slides available on web site First step of NWI is to examine past practice and attempt to identify current best practices to serve as a basis As a proof of concept, start with a spec for morpho- syntax

This meeting Look at relevant existing materials First goal: Look at approaches to overall architecture o Language Grid’s Service Ontology o W3C SAWSDL o Others? Determine if/how we should develop an ontology of linguistic objects, format for this o Relation to ISOCat?

(Bit of background) Technologies such as WSDL provide a way to specify the paramters of services, but at present they use categories such as those provided by SOAP which are basic programming types (string, integer, etc.) No project has come up with protocols for web services beyond this o UIMA type systems, various schemas do attempt to identify the objects for given tools o JULIE Labs UIMA types, MAF XML Schema are the most comprehensive

This meeting Second goal: Look at existing specs for morpho-syntax By end of meeting, come up with a preliminary spec for input and output parameters for part of speech taggers