Semantic Assistants – User-Centric Natural Language Processing Services for Desktop Clients

Today's knowledge workers have to spend a large amount of time and manual effort on creating, analyzing, and modifying textual content. While more advanced semantically-oriented analysis techniques have been developed in recent years, they have not yet found their way into commonly used desktop clients, be they generic (e.g., word processors, email clients) or domain-specific (e.g., software IDEs, biological tools). Instead of forcing the user to leave his current context and use an external application, we propose a ``Semantic Assistants'' approach, where semantic analysis services relevant for the user's current task are offered directly within a desktop application. Our approach relies on an OWL ontology model for context and service information and integrates external natural language processing (NLP) pipelines through W3C Web services.