Towards Standardization of Web Service Protocols for NLPaaS

Several web services for various natural language processing (NLP) tasks (‘‘NLP-as-a-service” or NLPaaS) have recently been made publicly available. However, despite their similar functionality these services often differ in the protocols they use, thus complicating the development of clients accessing them. A survey of currently available NLPaaS services suggests that it may be possible to identify a minimal application layer protocol that can be shared by NLPaaS services without sacrificing functionality or convenience, while at the same time simplifying the development of clients for these services. In this paper, we hope to raise awareness of the interoperability problems caused by the variety of existing web service protocols, and describe an effort to identify a set of best practices for NLPaaS protocol design. To that end, we survey and compare protocols used by NLPaaS services and suggest how these protocols may be further aligned to reduce variation.