SplineAPI: A REST API for NLP Services

Abstract

Modern applications often use Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques and algorithms to provide sets of rich features. Researchers, who come up with these algorithms, often implement them for case studies, evaluation or as proof of concepts. These implementations are, in most cases, freely available for download and use. Nevertheless, these implementations do not comprise final software packages, with extensive installation instructions and detailed usage guides. Most lack a proper installation mechanism and library dependency tracking. The programming interfaces are, usually, limited to their usage through command line, or with just a few programming languages support. To overcome these shortcomings, this work aims to develop a new web platform to make available a set of common operations to third party applications that can be used to quickly access NLP based processes. Of course this platform still relies on the same tools mentioned before, as a base support to specific requests. Nevertheless, the end user will not need to install and learn their specific Application Programming Interfaces (API). For this to be possible, the architectural solution is to implement a RESTful API that hides all the tool details in a simple API that is common or, at least, coherent, across the different tools.