Semantic Assistants: OpenOffice.org Writer Plug-In

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1. Overview

Our OpenOffice and LibreOffice plug-in provides for an integration of the Writer word processor into the Semantic Assistants Architecture. It introduces a user interface for offering various natural language processing services to users, such as named-entity recognition & automatic text summarization among others. Results are either displayed as new documents or as annotations (using side-notes) on the existing document.

OpenOffice.org Writer with Semantic Assistants

2. Download & Installation

If you just want to install the plug-in, you can do this directly from within OpenOffice via the (Tools → Extension Manager...) menu and add the latest SemassistOpenOfficePlugIn.oxt downloadable from Jenkins. Once installation is complete, OpenOffice may require to be restarted.

OpenOffice Extension Manager

3. Features

The Semantic Assistants plug-in is basically a Java archive (JAR) file that ships with its own specific content and a description file to introduce itself to the OpenOffice plug-in loader. Once the Semantic Assistants plug-in is installed, it adds a new menu item to the OpenOffice toolbar through which a user can inquire about available Natural Language Processing services and execute them on one the current document.

Semantic Assistants menu in OpenOffice

For natural language services that return annotations, the plug-in will automatically highlight their occurrences in the text and show the corresponding side-notes with relevant information. For services that return entire documents, in particular HTML and textual documents, the plug-in decides to display them either through the word-processor or a browser.

4. Further Reading

For more details and background on the Writer plug-in, please refer to our research paper: Gitzinger, T., and R. Witte, "Enhancing the OpenOffice.org Word Processor with Natural Language Processing Capabilities", Natural Language Processing resources, algorithms and tools for authoring aids, Marrakech, Morocco, June 1, 2008.

If you use our Writer plugin within your own research, please also cite this paper.