A Distributed Prototyping Environment for Human Language Technology

The DARPA Communicator program has fuelled the design and development of impressive human language technology applications. Its distributed framework has offered numerous benefits to the research community, including reduced prototype development time, sharing of components across sites, and provision of a standard evaluation platform. It has also enabled development of client-server applications with complex inter-process communication between modules. However, this latter feature, though beneficial, introduces complexities which reduce overall system robustness to failure. In addition, the ability to handle multiple users and multiple applications from a common interface is not innately supported. In this paper, we describe our enhancements to the original Communicator architecture to address robustness issues and to support a multiple multi-user application capability. These enhancements have been evaluated using a series of experiments and they have shown a 7.2% improvement in the robustness of the system. These enhancements are available in our public domain toolkit