Recent improvements to the ATLAS architecture

We examine the recent improvements that were made to the ATLAS (Architecture and Tools for Linguistic Analysis Systems) architecture. We first introduce the architecture and the historical context for this work. Next, we describe NIST's initial implementation of the framework before analyzing it. We then focus on three important improvements (relating to multi-dimensional signals, hierarchical structures and validation) we have made to the architecture to make it more usable. We conclude by summarizing the major points covered and discuss plans for future work.