Steven Bethard wrote:
On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 2:24 AM, Thilo Goetz <[email protected]> wrote:
Forwarded with permission by Terry...
Terry Heinze wrote:
We use UIMA fairly extensively as an underlying framework for supporting NLP
solutions for various Thomson Reuters divisions. Regrettably, I don't follow
the discussion threads as religiously as I should. Can you point me to the
discussion/proposal on using Java descriptors vs. xml descriptors. Our
current deployment strategy depends on the ability to read in and
dynamically alter the descriptors prior to creating the corresponding UIMA
components.
[...]
It's certainly possible to dynamically alter AnalysisEngineDescription
objects - if it weren't, we couldn't create them in the first place.
;-) Of course, the way you modify an AnalysisEngineDescription Java
object, and the way you modify an XML descriptor object are different.
There was no proposal, really. The ClearTK folks said (if I understood
them correctly) that they don't keep any descriptors on disk, but generated
them dynamically at runtime. To which I replied that this essentially
makes the components unusable to anybody else, since they're missing the
descriptors. I'm still not sure though that there wasn't a misunderstanding
on my part somewhere...
At the moment, we include XML descriptors for our components as well
as the AnalysisEngineDescriptor factory functions. But I'm still
unconvinced that not having those XML descriptors makes our components
"unusable". The UIMA framework APIs work on AnalysisEngineDescription
objects, so components that provide such objects are still fully
usable within the UIMA framework. But I think I probably just don't
understand what you mean by "unusable".'
Steve,
If you ship xml descriptors, then someone who creates CPEs with the gui
and runs them with SimpleRunCPE can use them easily. If you don't,
your components are still usable, though with a bit more work. Either
the user writes XML descriptors for them and proceeds with the CPE editor
and SimpleRunCPE, or they modify SimpleRunCPE or similar code (as I
understand you to have done ) to create the components in java without
getting the meta data from xml.
-Chris
Steve
