Marshall Schor wrote: [...] > I agree that backward compatibility is important and is an issue. To > help the transition to this new scheme, I think an overall global switch > is needed (similar to the switches we have for JCas "interning") that > would by default make things work the way they do now. A user > interested in small-footprint operation (and in trading off some > additional processing cycles to achieve it) would enable this switch. > > To help it "work" - we would allow things to continue to operation which > "set" a non-stored feature - theset would just become no-ops. Then if > the annotator wasn't paying attention to ResultSpecification, and tried > to set features that were not used, it would still work. > > On the other end, if an annotator actually made use of a particular > feature, but didn't specify it in its "input capability specification", > that would fail with this scheme. The failure would be some kind of > Java exception, which would probably be noticed. To recover, a user of > such a component would modify the input capability specification to > indicate that that feature was needed.
If a feature is defined in the type system, it should be there for the annotator writer to use. Who are we to know how people will use those features? > > As I write this, I notice that the input capability specification for a > primitive annotator doesn't quite fit the meaning hear - because I think > it means that this annotator needs that feature upon input - and this > edge case - where the annotator itself produces this feature, and then > also uses it - is not part of that definition. We could either expand > the meaning here to include this edge case, or (possibly a better > option) introduce, explicitly, another piece of metadata indicating that > a particular type/field was both created and used by this one primitive > annotator. A third option could be to store these "unused" features if > set (in some out-of-line temporary storage) for the duration of the > running of a particular annotator, just in case these were "used" by the > same annotator, and then discard that extra storage after the annotator > exits. This would be a big (but temporary) storage hit, though, so I > don't think I would want to do this. I vote we don't make things even more complicated than they already are, and educate those people who need a performance boost. --Thilo
