Classifying standard linguistic processing functionalities based on fundamental data operation types

It is often argued that a set of standard linguistic processing functionalities should be identified, with each of them given a formal specification. We would benefit from the formal specifications; for example, the semi-automated composition of a complex language processing workflow could be enabled in due time. This paper extracts a standard set of linguistic processing functionalities and tries to classify them formally. To do this, we first investigated prominent types of language Web services/linguistic processors by surveying a Web-based language service infrastructure and published NLP toolkits. We next induced a set of standard linguistic processing functionalities by carefully investigating each of the linguistic processor types. The standard linguistic processing functionalities was then characterized by the input/output data types, as well as the required data operation types, which were also derived from the investigation. As a result, we came up with an ontological depiction that classifies linguistic processors and linguistic processing functionalities with respect to the fundamental data operation types. We argue that such an ontological depiction can explicitly describe the functional aspects of a linguistic processing functionality.