Apache uimaFIT (TM)

What is uimaFIT?

Configuring UIMA components is generally achieved by creating XML descriptor files which tell the framework at runtime how components should be instantiated and deployed. These XML descriptor files are very tightly coupled with the Java implementation of the components they describe. We have found that it is very difficult to keep the two consistent with each other especially when code refactoring is very frequent. uimaFIT provides Java annotations for describing UIMA components which can be used to directly describe the UIMA components in the code. This greatly simplifies refactoring a component definition (e.g. changing a configuration parameter name). It also makes it possible to generate XML descriptor files as part of the build cycle rather than being performed manually in parallel with code creation. uimaFIT also makes it easy to instantiate UIMA components without using XML descriptor files at all by providing a number of convenience factory methods which allow programmatic/dynamic instantiation of UIMA components. This makes uimaFIT an ideal library for testing UIMA components because the component can be easily instantiated and invoked without requiring a descriptor file to be created first. uimaFIT is also helpful in research environments in which programmatic/dynamic instantiation of a pipeline can simplify experimentation. For example, when performing 10-fold cross-validation across a number of experimental conditions it can be quite laborious to create a different set of descriptor files for each run or even a script that generates such descriptor files. uimaFIT is type system agnostic and does not depend on (or provide) a specific type system.

uimaFIT is a library that provides factories, injection, and testing utilities for UIMA. The following list highlights some of the features uimaFIT provides:

• Factories: simplify instantiating UIMA components programmatically without descriptor files. For example, to instantiate an AnalysisEngine a call like this could be made:

  AnalysisEngineFactory.createEngine(MyAEImpl.class, myTypeSystem,
    paramName1, paramValue2, 
    paramName2, paramValue2, 
    ...)
  

• Injection: handles the binding of configuration parameter values to the corresponding member variables in the analysis engines and handles the binding of external resources. For example, to bind a configuration parameter just annotate a member variable with @ConfigurationParameter. External resources can likewise by injected via the @ExternalResource annotation. Then add one line of code to your initialize method:

  ConfigurationParameterInitializer.initialize(this, uimaContext).
  

  This is handled automatically if you extend the uimaFIT JCasAnnotator_ImplBase class.

• Testing: uimaFIT simplifies testing in a number of ways described in the documentation. By making it easy to instantiate your components without descriptor files a large amount of difficult-to-maintain and unnecessary XML can be eliminated from your test code. This makes tests easier to write and maintain. Also, running components as a pipeline can be accomplished with a method call like this:

  SimplePipeline.runPipeline(reader, ae1, ..., aeN, consumer1, ... consumerN)
  

uimaFIT is a part of the Apache UIMA(TM) project. uimaFIT can only be used in conjunction with a compatible version of the Java version of the Apache UIMA SDK. For your convenience, the binary distribution package of uimaFIT includes all libraries necessary to use uimaFIT. In particular for novice users, it is strongly advised to obtain a copy of the full UIMA SDK separately.

Availability

uimaFIT is licensed under the Apache License 2.0 and is available from the Apache UIMA project:

https://uima.apache.org https://github.com/apache/uima-uimafit

uimaFIT is available via Maven Central. If you use Maven for your build environment, then you can add uimaFIT as a dependency to your pom.xml file with the following:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.apache.uima</groupId>
  <artifactId>uimafit-core</artifactId>
  <version>3.3.0</version>
</dependency>

Modules

• uimafit-core - the main uimaFIT module
• uimafit-cpe - support for the Collection Processing Engine (multi-threaded pipelines)
• uimafit-maven - a Maven plugin to automatically enhance UIMA components with uimaFIT metadata and to generate XML descriptors for uimaFIT-enabled components.
• uimafit-junit - convenience code facilitating the implementation of UIMA/ uimaFIT tests in JUnit tests
• uimafit-assertj - adds assertions for UIMA/uimaFIT types via the AssertJ framework
• uimafit-spring - an experimental module serving as a proof-of-concept for the integration of UIMA with the Spring Framework. It is currently not considered finished and uses invasive reflection in order to patch the UIMA framework such that it passes all components created by UIMA through Spring to provide for the wiring of Spring context dependencies. This module is made available for the adventurous but currently not considered stable, finished, or even a proper part of the package. E.g. it is not included in the binary distribution package.

Reference

If you use uimaFIT to support academic research, then please consider citing the following paper as appropriate:

@InProceedings{ogren-bethard:2009:SETQA-NLP,
  author    = {Ogren, Philip  and  Bethard, Steven},
  title     = {Building Test Suites for {UIMA} Components},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Software Engineering, Testing, and Quality Assurance for Natural Language Processing (SETQA-NLP 2009)},
  month     = {June},
  year      = {2009},
  address   = {Boulder, Colorado},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  pages     = {1--4},
  url       = {http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W/W09/W09-1501}
}

History

Since end of 2012, uimaFIT is part of the Apache UIMA project.

Apache uimaFIT was formerly known as uimaFIT, which in turn was formerly known as UUTUC.

Before uimaFIT has become an sub-project within the Apache UIMA project, it is was collaborative effort between the Center for Computational Pharmacology at the University of Colorado Denver, the Center for Computational Language and Education Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing (UKP) Lab at the Technische Universität Darmstadt.

The initial uimaFIT development team was:

Philip Ogren, University of Colorado, USA Richard Eckart de Castilho, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany Steven Bethard, Stanford University, USA

with contributions from Niklas Jakob, Fabio Mancinelli, Chris Roeder, Philipp Wetzler, Shuo Yang, Torsten Zesch.

Support

Please direct questions to [email protected].