Engineering of IE systems: An object-oriented approach

In order to design complex, effective and adaptable NLP systems a methodology able to satisfy two traditionally conflicting requirements in software engineering, i.e (linguistic) expressiveness and robustness, is necessary. By combining NLP methodologies and Language Engineering (LE) methods with Software Engineering (SE) criteria, we propose a software infrastructure able to optimize the design and development of complex IE applications. The basic idea is to embed within the software infrastructure itself a suitable linguistic description and make available at a computational level relevant portions of the linguistic abstraction required by a variety of applications.