SiSSA: An Infrastructure for Developing NLP Applications

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the commercial deployment of NLP technologies. This paper presents SiSSA, a project whose main aim is that of developing an infrastructure for prototyping, editing and validation of NLP application architectures. The system will provide the user with a graphical environment for (1) selecting the NLP activities relevant for the particular NLP task and the associated linguistic processors that execute them; (2) connecting new linguistic processors to SiSSA; (3) checking that the chosen architectural hypothesis corresponds to the functional specifications of the given application. The proposed infrastructure makes crucial use of state-of-the-art software technologies (CORBA, XML, RDF) to integrate different linguistic processors in an effective way. In the paper the definition of a metaformalism for the unification of different formalisms for grammar description is also briefly presented.