FreeLing 2.1: Five Years of Open-Source Language Processing Tools

Abstract

FreeLing is an open-source multilingual language processing library providing a wide range of language analyzers for several languages. It offers text processing and language annotation facilities to natural language processing application developers, simplifying the task of building those applications. FreeLing is customizable and extensible. Developers can use the default linguistic resources (dictionaries, lexicons, grammars, etc.) directly, or extend them, adapt them to specific domains, or even develop new ones for specific languages. This paper overviews the recent history of this tool, summarizes the improvements and extensions incorporated in the latest version, and depicts the architecture of the library. Special focus is brought to the fact and consequences of the library being open-source: After five years and over 35,000 downloads, a growing user community has extended the initial three languages (English, Spanish and Catalan) to eight (adding Galician, Italian, Welsh, Portuguese, and Asturian), proving that the collaborative open model is a productive approach for the development of NLP tools and resources.