Cloud Computing for the Humanities: Two Approaches for Language Technology

The paper describes Aelred, a web application that demonstrates the use of language technology in the Google App Engine cloud computing environment. Aelred serves up English literary texts with optional concordances for any word and a range of linguistic annotations including part-of-speech tagging, shallow parsing, and word sense definitions from WordNet. Two alternative approaches are described. In the first approach, annotations are created offline and uploaded to the cloud datastore. In the second approach, annotations are created online within the cloud computing framework. In both cases standard HTML is generated with a template engine so that the annotations can be viewed in ordinary web browsers.