CI-ADDO-EN: Flexible Machine Learning for Natural Language in the MALLET Toolkit

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Natural language processing, information extraction, informationintegration and other text processing solutions are central componentsof computer science, and key tools for addressing the ever-increasingproblems in information overload. Issues of information overload arenot only personal problems, but critical for business productivity,national defense, and increasingly government decision-making andtransparency.State-of-the-art natural language processing is increasingly based onmachine learning. However, the methodologies can be complex, andsoftware infrastructure necessary for such systems is generallydifficult to develop from scratch. To address this need we havecreated MALLET (MAchine Learning for LanguagE) and FACTORIE (Factorgraphs, Imperative, Extensible), open-source software toolkit that runin the Java virtual machine. They provide many modernstate-of-the-art machine learning methods, specially tuned to bescalable for the idiosyncrasies of natural language data, while alsoapplying well to many other discrete non- language tasks.The project will fill three critical gaps: (1) broadening thesetoolkits' applicability to new data and tasks (with better end-userinterfaces for labeling, training and diagnostics), (2) greatlyenhancing their research-support capabilities (with infrastructure forflexibly specifying model structures), and (3) improving theirunderstandability and support (with new documentation, examples,online community support).The project will have a direct positive impact on NLP and othermachine learning research, on teaching, and on collaborative researchactivities. Well-designed toolkits not only help researchers avoidduplicate implementation effort, but (a) they encourage sharing ofalgorithms and code, and thus also cultivate increased collaborationand intellectual flow of ideas; (b) they foster the communication ofdetailed clarity of algorithms and scientific reproducibility; (c)they help "level the playing field" by providing state-of-the-artimplementations of foundational building blocks and recent methods totop-tier and small institutions alike; (d) they supply a teachingtool, not only by making it easy for students to experiment with thesupplied research methodologies. Furthermore, by providing multipleready-to-use systems, non-programmers will have access to modern,scalable implementations of text processing tools that will spreadknowledge and use of these techniques across fields, to the socialsciences, humanities, and bio-medical fields.For further information see the project web site at the URL:http://www.cs.umass.edu/~mccallum/nsf-mallet