DUUIgateway: A web service for platform-independent, ubiquitous big data NLP

Distributed processing of unstructured text data is a challenge in the rapidly changing and evolving natural language processing (NLP) landscape. This landscape is characterized by heterogeneous systems, models, and formats, and especially by the increasing influence of AI systems. While many of these systems handle text data, there are also unified systems that process multiple input and output formats, while allowing for distributed corpus processing. However, there are hardly any user-friendly interfaces that allow existing NLP frameworks to be used flexibly and extended in a user-controlled manner. Due to this gap and the increasing importance of NLP for various scientific disciplines, there has been a demand for a web and API based flexible software solution for deploying, managing and monitoring NLP systems. Such a solution is provided by Docker Unified UIMA Interface-gateway . We introduce DUUIgateway and evaluate its API and user-driven approach to encapsulation. We also describe how these features improve the usability and accessibility of the NLP framework DUUI . We illustrate DUUIgateway in the field of process modeling in higher education and show how it closes the latter gap in NLP by making a variety of systems for processing text and multimodal data accessible to non-experts.