Shallow, Deep and Hybrid Processing with UIMA and Heart of Gold

Heart of Gold is a lightweight, XML-based middleware architecture that has been developed for this purpose. It supports hybrid, i.e. combined shallow and deep processing workflows of multiple NLP components to increase robustness and exploit synergy, and linguistic resources for multiple languages. The notion of explicit transformation between component input and output enables flexible interaction of existing NLP components. Heart of Gold foresees both tightly (same process) and loosely coupled (via networked services) processing modes. Assuming familarity with UIMA, we introduce Heart of Gold and propose and discuss hybrid integration scenarios in the context of UIMA. Possible applications include precision-oriented question answering, deep information extraction and opinion mining, textual entailment checking and machine translation.