An Interface for Rapid Natural Language Processing Development in UIMA

This demonstration presents the Annotation Librarian, an application programming interface that supports rapid development of natural language processing (NLP) projects built in Apache Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA). The flexibility of UIMA to support all types of unstructured data – images, audio, and text – increases the complexity of some of the most common NLP development tasks. The Annotation Librarian interface handles these common functions and allows the creation and management of annotations by mirroring Java methods used to manipulate Strings. The familiar syntax and NLP-centric design allows developers to adopt and rapidly develop NLP algorithms in UIMA. The general functionality of the interface is described in relation to the use cases that necessitated its creation.