Engineering of IE systems: An object-oriented approach

In order to design complex, effective and adaptable NLP systems a methodolo gy able to satisfy two traditionally conflicting requirements in software e ngineering, i.e (linguistic) expressiveness and robustness, is necessary. B y combining NLP methodologies and Language Engineering (LE) methods with So ftware Engineering (SE) criteria, we propose a software infrastructure able to optimize the design and development of complex IE applications. The bas ic idea is to embed within the software infrastructure itself a suitable li nguistic description and make available at a computational level relevant p ortions of the linguistic abstraction required by a variety of applications .