Conference article

We introduce LaMachine, a unified Natural Language Processing (NLP) open-source software distribution to facilitate the installation and deployment of a large amount of software projects that have been developed in the scope of the CLARIN-NL project and its current successor CLARIAH. Special attention is paid to encouragement of good software development practices and reuse of established infrastructure in the scientific and open-source software development community. We explain what LaMachine is, how it can be used and the technical details. We also compare LaMachine to alternative software distributions and discuss its advantages and limitations. We illustrate how LaMachine can be used in two case studies, one in an exploratory text mining project at the Dutch Health Inspectorate where LaMachine was applied to create a research environment for automatic text analysis for health care quality monitoring, and a second case where LaMachine was used to create a workspace for a one-week, intense collaboration by a diverse research team.

Software distribution, Software metadata, Virtual research environment, Virtual laboratory, Infrastructure