Kathaa: A Visual Programming Framework for NLP Applications

In this paper, we present Kathaa1, an open source web based Visual Programming Framework for NLP applications. It supports design, execution and analysis of complex NLP systems by choosing and visually connecting NLP modules from an already available and easily extensible Module library. It models NLP systems as a Directed Acyclic Graph of optionally parallalized information flow, and lets the user choose and use available modules in their NLP applications irrespective of their technical proficiency. Kathaa exposes a precise Module definition API to allow easy integration of external NLP components (along with their associated services as docker containers), it allows everyone to publish their services in a standardized format for everyone else to use it out of the box.