Automatic Pipeline Construction for Real-Time Annotation

Many annotation tasks in computational linguistics are tackled with manually constructed pipelines of algorithms. In real-time tasks where information needs are stated and addressed ad-hoc, however, manual construction is infeasible. This paper presents an artificial intelligence approach to automatically construct annotation pipelines for given information needs and quality prioritizations. Based on an abstract ontological model, we use partial order planning to select a pipeline’s algorithms and informed search to obtain an efficient pipeline schedule. We realized the approach as an expert system on top of Apache UIMA, which offers evidence that pipelines can be constructed ad-hoc in near-zero time.