Development and Analysis of NLP Pipelines in Argo

Developing sophisticated NLP pipelines composed of multiple processing tools and components available through different providers may pose a challenge in terms of their interoperability. The Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) is an industry standard whose aim is to ensure such interoperability by defining common data structures and interfaces. The architecture has been gaining attention from industry and academia alike, resulting in a large volume of UIMA-compliant processing components. In this paper, we demonstrate Argo, a Web-based workbench for the development and processing of NLP pipelines/workflows. The workbench is based upon UIMA, and thus has the potential of using many of the existing UIMA resources. We present features, and show examples, of facilitating the distributed development of components and the analysis of processing results. The latter includes annotation visualisers and editors, as well as serialisation to RDF format, which enables flexible querying in addition to data manipulation thanks to the semantic query language SPARQL. The distributed development feature allows users to seamlessly connect their tools to workflows running in Argo, and thus take advantage of both the available library of components (without the need of installing them locally) and the analytical tools.