LanguageWare is a natural language processing (NLP) technology developed by IBM, which allows applications to process natural language text. It comprises a set of Java libraries which provide a range of NLP functions: language identification, text segmentation/tokenization, normalization, entity and relationship extraction, and semantic analysis and disambiguation. The analysis engine uses Finite State Machine approach at multiple levels, which aids its performance characteristics, while maintaining a reasonably small footprint.
The behaviour of the system is driven by a set of configurable lexico-semantic resources which describe the characteristics and domain of the processed language. A default set of resources comes as part of LanguageWare and these describe the native language characteristics, such as morphology, and the basic vocabulary for the language. Supplemental resources have been created which capture additional vocabularies, terminologies, rules and grammars, which may be generic to the language or specific to one or more domains.
A set of Eclipse-based customization tooling, LanguageWare Resource Workbench, is available on IBM's alphaWorks site, and allows domain knowledge to be compiled into these resources and thereby incorporated into the analysis process.
LanguageWare can be deployed as a set of UIMA-compliant annotators, Eclipse plug-ins or Web Services.