PSI-Toolkit: A Natural Language Processing Pipeline

The paper presents the main ideas and the architecture of the open source PSI-Toolkit, a set of linguistic tools being developed within a project financed by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education. The toolkit is intended for experienced language engineers as well as casual users not having any technological background. The former group of users is delivered a set of libraries that may be included in their Perl, Python or Java applications. The needs of the latter group should be satisfied by a user friendly web interface. The main feature of the toolkit is its data structure, the so-called PSI-lattice that assembles annotations delivered by all PSI tools. This cohesive architecture allows the user to invoke a series of processes with one command. The command has the form of a pipeline of instructions resembling shell command pipelines known from Linux-based systems.