UIMA: an architectural approach to unstructured information processing in the corporate research environment

IBM Research has over 200 people working on Unstructured Information Management (UIM) technologies with a strong focus on Natural Language Processing (NLP). These researchers are engaged in activities ranging from natural language dialog, information retrieval, topic-tracking, named-entity detection, document classification and machine translation to bioinformatics and open-domain question answering. An analysis of these activities strongly suggested that improving the organization’s ability to quickly discover each other's results and rapidly combine different technologies and approaches would accelerate scientific advance. Furthermore, the ability to reuse and combine results through a common architecture and a robust software framework would accelerate the transfer of research results in NLP into IBM’s product platforms. Market analyses indicating a growing need to process unstructured information, specifically multilingual, natural language text, coupled with IBM Research’s investment in NLP, led to the development of middleware architecture for processing unstructured information dubbed UIMA. At the heart of UIMA are powerful search capabilities and a data-driven framework for the development, composition and distributed deployment of analysis engines. In this paper we give a general introduction to UIMA focusing on the design points of its analysis engine architecture and we discuss how UIMA is helping to accelerate research and technology transfer. 1  We characterize a UIM application as a software system that analyzes large volumes of unstructured information while consulting structured information sources to discover, organize and present knowledge relevant to the application’s end-user. We define structured information as information whose intended meaning is unambiguous and explicitly represented in the structure or format of the data. The canonical example of structured information is a relational database table. We define unstructured information as information whose intended meaning is only loosely implied by its form. The canonical example is a natural language document; other examples include voice, audio, image and video. To appear in a special issue of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering 2004 2 Ferrucci and Lally Do Not Distirubte without written permission from authors Market indicators suggest a rapid increase in the use of text and voice analytics to a growing class of commercially viable applications (Roush 2003). National security interests are driving applications to involve an even broader set of UIM technologies including image and video analytics. Emerging and commercially important UIM application areas include life sciences, e-commerce, technical support, advanced search, and national and business intelligence. In six major labs spread out over the globe, IBM Research has over 200 people working on Unstructured Information Management (UIM) technologies with a primary focus on Natural Language Processing (NLP). These researchers are engaged in activities ranging from natural language dialog, information retrieval, topic-tracking, named-entity detection, document classification and machine translation to bioinformatics and open-domain question answering. Each group is developing different technical and engineering approaches to process unstructured information in pursuit of their specific research agenda in the UIM space. While IBM Research’s independent UIM technologies fare well in scientific venues, accelerated development of integrated, robust applications is becoming increasingly important to IBM’s commercial interests. Furthermore the rapid integration of different alogorthims and techniques is also a means to advance scientific results. For example, experiments in statistical name-entity detection or machine translation may benefit from using a deep parser as a feature generator. Facilitating the rapid integration of an independently produced deep parser with statistical algorithm implementations can accelerate the research cycle time as well as the time to product. Some of the challenges that face a large research organization in efficiently leveraging and integrating its (and third-party) UIM assets include: • Organizational Structure. IBM Research is largely organized in three to five person teams geographically dispersed among different labs throughout world. This structure makes it more difficult to jointly develop and reuse technologies. • Skills Alignment. There are inefficiencies in having PhDs trained and specialized in, for example, computational linguistics or statistical machine learning, develop and apply the requisite systems expertise to deliver their work into product architectures and/or make it easily usable by other researchers. To appear in a special issue of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering 2004 3 Ferrucci and Lally Do Not Distirubte without written permission from authors • Development Inefficiencies. Research results are delivered in a myriad of interfaces and technologies. Reuse and integration often requires too much effort dedicated to technical adaptation. Too often work is replicated. • Speed to product. Software Products introduce their own architectures, interfaces and implementation technologies. Technology transfer from the lab to the products often becomes a significant engineering or rewrite effort for researchers. A common framework and engineering discipline could help address the challenges listed above. The Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) project was initiated within IBM Research based on the premise that a common software architecture for developing, composing and delivering UIM technologies, if adopted by the organization, would facilitate technology reuse and integration, enable quicker scientific experimentation and speed the path to product. IBM’s Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) high-level objectives are two fold: 1) Accelerate scientific advances by enabling the rapid combination of UIM technologies (e.g., natural language processing, audio and video analysis, information retrieval, etc.). 2) Accelerate transfer of UIM technologies to product by providing an architecture and associated framework implementations that promote reuse and support flexible deployment options. 2 The Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) UIMA is a software architecture for developing UIM applications. The UIMA high-level architecture, illustrated in Figure 1, defines the roles, interfaces and communications of large-grained components essential for UIM applications. These include components capable of analyzing unstructured artifacts, integrating and accessing structured sources and storing, indexing and searching for artifacts based on discovered semantic content resulting from analyses. A primary design point for UIMA is that it should admit the implementation of middleware frameworks that provide a component-based infrastructure for developing UIM applications suitable for vastly different deployment environments. These should range from lightweight and embeddable implementations to highly scalable implementations that are meant to exploit clusters of machines and provide high throughput, high availability serviced-based offerings. While the primary focus of current UIMA framework implementations is squarely on natural language To appear in a special issue of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering 2004 4 Ferrucci and Lally Do Not Distirubte without written permission from authors UIM Application Analysis Collection Level Analysis Document, Collection & Metadata Store Knowledge Source Access Collection Processing Manager (CPM) Knowledge & Data Bases Unstructured Information (Text) Analysis Engines Crawlers Analysis Engine Directory Acquisition Unstructured Information Analysis Structured Information Access Semantic Search Engine Indices Indices Documents Collections Metadata Knowledge Source Adapter Directory Access