Reusability as Easy Adaptability: A Substantial Advance in NL Technology

The design and implementation of new applications in NLP at low costs mostly depends upon the availability of technologies oriented to the solution of any specific problem. The success of this task, besides the use of widely agreed formats and standards, relies upon at least two families of tools, those for managing and updating, and those for projecting an "application view-point" onto the data in the repository. This approach has different realizations if applied to a dictionary, a corpus, or a grammar. Some examples, taken frrom European and other industrial projects, show that reusability: a) in the building of industrial prototypes consists in the easy reconfiguration of resources (dictionary and grammar), easy portability and easy recombination of tools, by means of simple APIs, as well as on different implementation platforms: b) in the building of advanced applications still consists in the same features, together with the possibility of opening different view-points on dictionaries and