In this paper, we present a project where existing text-based core technologies were ported to Java-based web services from various architectures. These technologies were developed over a period of eight years through various government funded projects for 10 resource-scarce languages spoken in South Africa. We describe the API and a simple web front-end capable of completing various predefined tasks.

The development of linguistic resources for use in natural language processing is of utmost importance for the continued growth of research and development in the field, especially for resource-scarce languages. In this paper we describe the process and challenges of simultaneously developing multiple linguistic resources for ten of the official languages of South Africa. The project focussed on establishing a set of foundational resources that can foster further development of both resources and technologies for the NLP industry in South Africa. The development efforts during the project included creating monolingual unannotated corpora, of which a subset of the corpora for each language was annotated on token, orthographic, morphological and morphosyntactic layers. The annotated subsets includes both development and test sets and were used in the creation of five core-technologies, viz. a tokeniser, sentenciser, lemmatiser, part of speech tagger and morphological decomposer for each language. We report on the quality of these tools for each language and discuss the importance of the resources within the South African context.