HeartofgoldTop

Heart of Gold

http://heartofgold.dfki.de is the current 'official' website where you can find [http://heartofgold.dfki.de/Documentation.html documentation], [http://heartofgold.dfki.de/Download.html downloads] and [http://heartofgold.dfki.de/Publications.html papers].

The [http://heartofgold.dfki.de Heart of Gold] is a middleware architecture for the integration of deep and shallow natural language processing components. It provides a uniform and flexible infrastructure for building applications that use Robust Minimal Recursion Semantics ([wiki:RmrsTop RMRS]) and/or general XML standoff annotation produced by natural language processing components. The framework uses [http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt XSLT] as integration language for querying and combining XML standoff markup.

The main purpose Heart of Gold was developed for is integration of various shallow natural language processors with the highly efficient [http://hpsg.stanford.edu HPSG] parser [wiki:PetTop PET] in order to increase robustness of HPSG grammars for various languages such as [http://www.delph-in.net/erg English], [http://www.dfki.de/~crysmann/gg/ German], [http://www.delph-in.net/jacy Japanese], [http://www.delph-in.net/mgrg Greek] and Norwegian. HPSG grammars can be developed with the [wiki:LkbTop LKB], compiled to a binary grammar image, and at runtime executed by PET within the Heart of Gold.

Although the focus of Heart of Gold is deep-shallow integration, the framework itself is generic and hence could also be used to, e.g., combine multiple purely shallow systems on XML basis, or to integrate other deep parsers.

The Heart of Gold has been developed under the wings of the EU-funded project [http://www.project-deepthought.net/ DeepThought] and the BMBF-funded project [http://quetal.dfki.de QUETAL] and in the context of the DELPH-IN collaboration.

The core middleware (and also the PET system) is available under an LGPL open source license. However, some of the components for which we provide adapters are only available for research purposes or have their own licenses different from LGPL.

There is also a [http://lists.delph-in.net/mailman/listinfo/hog mailing list] for discussions and announcements concerning Heart of Gold.