LREC 2014 Tutorial
Web Services for Effective NLP Application Development and Evaluation:
Using and Contributing to the Language Application (LAPPS) Grid

Presenters: Nancy Ide, James Pustejovsky, Eric Nyberg, Keith Suderman, Di Wang, Chunqi Shi

9:00-9:30am: Part I. Introduction 
   1. Overview of web service technology
       a. What are web services?
       b. Advantages of web service use for NLP application development
       c. How web services work: communication 
             i. Protocols and wrappers 
            ii. Data interchange: JSON and JSON-LD for syntactic interoperability
           iii. Data interchange: issues and options for semantic interoperability, ISO/LAPPS Web Service Exchange Vocabulary
   2. The LAPPS Grid
        a. Project overview
        b. Architecture
             i. Core nodes and distributed services
            ii. The composer platform
        c. Available services
             i. Data sources
            ii. NLP components
           iii. Open Advancement evaluation services

9:30-10:30am: Part II. Contributing to the LAPPS Grid: Hands-on exercise
    1. Wrapping tools as web services*
    2. Mapping input and output to the exchange vocabulary 
    3. Registering tools in the LAPPS Grid

* Participants will be urged to wrap and register their own tools, which will then be made available win the Grid for use
in Part III of the tutorial

10:30-11:00am: Coffee Break

11:00-12:30pm: Part III. Using the LAPPS Grid: Hands-on exercise
   1. Using the composer
       a. Selecting a data source
       b. Creating a processing pipeline: Sample task: Co-reference annotation*
       c. Deploying the pipeline
       d. Evaluating performance: Using the Open Advancement Evaluation Environment
       e. Iterative improvement
             i. Modifying the pipeline on the basis of OA analysis
            ii. Assessing results 

* Participants will be urged to utilize their own tools registered in the earlier part of the tutorial in the constructed pipelines