Microservices at Your Service: Bridging the Gap between NLP Research and Industry

Tiina Lindh-Knuutila, Hrafn Loftsson, Pedro Alonso Doval, Sebastian Andersson, Bjarni Barkarson, Héctor Cerezo-Costas, Jon Gudnason, Jökull Snær Gylfason, Jarmo Hemminki, Heiki-Jaan Kaalep

Keywords: NLP tools, microservices, European Language Grid

TL;DR: This paper describes our collaborative effort in providing 60 NLP tools in as microservices running at the European Language Grid.

Abstract: This paper describes a collaborative European project whose aim was to gather open source Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools and make them accessible as running services and easy to try out in the European Language Grid (ELG). The motivation of the project was to increase accessibility for more European languages and make it easier for developers to use the underlying tools in their own applications. The project resulted in the containerization of 60 existing NLP tools for 16 languages, all of which are now currently running as easily testable services in the ELG platform.