A Grid Based Architecture for High-Performance NLP

We describe the design and early implementation of an extensible, component-based software architecture for natural language engineering applications which interfaces with high performance distributed computing services. The architecture leverages existing linguistic resource description and discovery mechanisms based on metadata descriptions, combining these in a compatible fashion with other software definition abstractions. Within this architecture, application design is highly flexible, allowing disparate components to be combined to suit the overall application functionality, and formally described independently of processing concerns. An application specification language provides abstraction from the programming environment and allows ease of interface with high performance computational grids via a broker.