From greatest simplicity to full power: Research-Infrastructure-as-a-Service for language science and technology

Abstract

While language processing services are key assets for the science and technology of language, the possible ways under which they may be made available to the widest range of their end users are critical to support an Open Science policy for this scientific domain. Although providing such processing services under some web-based interface, at large, offers itself as an immediate and cogent response to that challenge, turning this view into an effective access to language processing services is an undertaking deserving a clear conceptual direction and a corresponding robust empirical validation. Based on an extensive overview of major undertakings towards making language processing tools available and on the design principles worked out and implemented in the PORTULAN CLARIN infrastructure, in this paper we advocate for a Research-Infrastructure-as-a-Service (RIaaS) model. This model unleashes accessibility to language processing services in as many web-based interface modalities as the current stage of technological development permits to support, in order to serve as many types of end users as possible, from IT developers to Digital Humanities researchers, and including citizen scientists, teachers, students and digital artists among many others.