AnnoMarket: An Open Cloud Platform for NLP

This paper presents AnnoMarket, an open cloud-based platform which enables researchers to deploy, share, and use language processing components and resources, following the data-as-a-service and software-as-a-service paradigms. The focus is on multilingual text analysis resources and services, based on an opensource infrastructure and compliant with relevant NLP standards. We demonstrate how the AnnoMarket platform can be used to develop NLP applications with little or no programming, to index the results for enhanced browsing and search, and to evaluate performance. Utilising AnnoMarket is straightforward, since cloud infrastructural issues are dealt with by the platform, completely transparently to the user: load balancing, efficient data upload and storage, deployment on the virtual machines, security, and fault tolerance.