Developing finite state NLP systems with a graphical environment

Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/b101749

Developing finite state natural language processing resources (such as morphological lexicons) and applications (such as light-parsers) is also a complex software engineering enterprise which can benefit from additional tools that enables to developers to manage the complexity of the development process. We describe visual interface and a development environment, for developing finite state language processing applications using the Xerox Finite State Tool, xfst, to address some of these engineering concerns. Vi-xfst lets a user construct complex regular expressions via a drag-and-drop visual interface, treating simpler regular expressions as Lego Blocks. It also enables the visualization of the topology of the regular expression components at different levels of granularity, enabling a user to easily understand and track the structural and functional relationships among the components involved.