The example WS component that we would like to implement will be a new TermAnnotator for English; for detailed information on the TermAnnotator component see section 4.2.3.1. We will follow a rather simple, dictionary-based approach: only terms which are contained in a given list of terms – the dictionary – will be annotated; for simplicity we will furthermore only annotate one type of terms.^[8] The actual finding of terms in input questions shall be handled by the free OpenNLP library.

In order to be able to closely follow this tutorial you should now get yourself a copy of the OpenNLP library. At the time of writing, version 1.4.3 was the latest release of that library which we also use here in the tutorial. After downloading and unpacking the archive you have to build the library first; therefore you can simply run Apache Ant on the provided build file in the root directory of your copy of the library. A new directory output will be created containing both the compiled classes as well as a JAR file containing the full library. Add either the compiled classes or the JAR file to your Java build path.

For this tutorial you also need the JAX-WS API on your Java build path. Section 3.1.4: “Java Web Service API And Tools” provides a brief summary on where to get this API.

Lastly we will also make use of existing code pieces from the implementations of the DemoKit or strictly speaking rather only from the Util class in the de.dfki.qallme package. So this class should be on your build path for this tutorial, too.