A Category Theory Approach to Interoperability
This work addresses interoperability issues in NLP pipelines for researchers and practitioners, though it is incremental as it applies existing mathematical concepts to a specific domain.
The authors tackled the problem of syntactic interoperability between linguistic tools by proposing a Category Theory approach, modeling NLP pipelines as categories with documents, tools, and format converters, and demonstrated its application on two real-life examples.
In this article, we propose a Category Theory approach to (syntactic) interoperability between linguistic tools. The resulting category consists of textual documents, including any linguistic annotations, NLP tools that analyze texts and add additional linguistic information, and format converters. Format converters are necessary to make the tools both able to read and to produce different output formats, which is the key to interoperability. The idea behind this document is the parallelism between the concepts of composition and associativity in Category Theory with the NLP pipelines. We show how pipelines of linguistic tools can be modeled into the conceptual framework of Category Theory and we successfully apply this method to two real-life examples.