Overview

Web services are a way of exposing the functionality of an information system and making it available through standard web technologies. These technologies are exposed programmatically, allowing anyone with internet access, regardless of platform, to access the system's output.

With the establishment of large-scale e-infrastructures, there has been an international shift toward making software available as a service. By adopting a service-oriented architecture, existing resources and tools can be utilised to develop complex, component-based systems. Hosting NLP web services can facilitate the development of end-user applications by providing software developers (e.g., private enterprises or the South African State Information Technology Agency) and researchers with direct access to implemented versions of such technologies through simple web queries.

For details on accessing the CTexT NCHLT Web Services, please see the Using the API page.

For users unaccustomed to a service-oriented architecture, the integration and use of components can be quite challenging. To address this, we developed an automated system to assist users in utilizing the services to complete specific tasks. This was achieved by creating a web-based, user-friendly graphical interface capable of performing various tasks through predefined chains of the web services outlined above. For instance, if a user needs to perform POS tagging on a document, they can upload the document, select POS tagging, and choose the relevant language. The system will automatically carry out tokenisation and sentence boundary detection before applying the POS tagging service to tag the document. For more details, please refer to the Using the Web Application section.

Please see the Technologies and Supported Languages page.

The project was funded by the South African government's Department of Sport, Arts and Culture.

The web services were developed by the Centre for Text Technology (CTexT) at the North-West University. CTexT conducts a variety of language technology projects, such as developing spelling checkers for ten South African languages, and thrives on new challenges and innovative ideas. To learn more about CTexT, visit http://humanities.nwu.ac.za/ctext.