Integrated Tools for Query-driven Development of Light-weight Ontologies and Information Extraction Components

This paper reports on a user-friendly terminology and information extraction development envi-ronment that integrates into existing infrastructure for natural language processing and aims to close a gap in the UIMA community. The tool supports domain experts in data-driven and manual terminology refinement and refactoring. It can propose new concepts and simple relations and includes an information extraction algorithm that considers the context of terms for disambigua-tion. With its tight integration of easy-to-use and technical tools for component development and resource management, the system is especially designed to shorten times necessary for do-main adaptation of such text processing components. Search support provided by the tool fosters this aspect and is helpful for building natural language processing modules in general. Special-ized queries are included to speed up several tasks, for example, the detection of new terms and concepts, or simple quality estimation without gold standard documents. The development en-vironment is modular and extensible by using Eclipse and the Apache UIMA framework. This paper describes the system’s architecture and features with a focus on search support. Notably, this paper proposes a generic middleware component for queries in a UIMA based workbench.