Extending an interoperable platform to facilitate the creation of multilingual and multimodal NLP applications

U-Compare is a UIMA-based workflow construction platform for building natural language processing (NLP) applications from heterogeneous language resources (LRs), without the need for programming skills. U-Compare has been adopted within the context of the METANET Network of Excellence, and over 40 LRs that process 15 European languages have been added to the U-Compare component library. In line with METANET’s aims of increasing communication between citizens of different European countries, U-Compare has been extended to facilitate the development of a wider range of applications, including both multilingual and multimodal workflows. The enhancements exploit the UIMA Subject of Analysis (Sofa) mechanism, that allows different facets of the input data to be represented. We demonstrate how our customised extensions to U-Compare allow the construction and testing of NLP applications that transform the input data in different ways, e.g., machine translation, automatic summarisation and text-to-speech.