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Tech versions

What are they?

In the Platform authoring application any project or corpus is based upon a tech version.
A tech version is a set of basic (no rules, no scripting) instances of NL Core, at least one for each supported language, but there may be more instances for a given language if it's deemed that processing document in parallel is needed and enough computing slots are available.

Multiple tech versions can be defined for the same installation of Platform and used at the same time.

Tech versions are managed by users belonging to the Owner role and at least one tech version must be created and activated before users can start working on projects and corpora.

Where are they used?

The NL Core instances of a tech version are used:

  • In corpora, categorization projects, extraction projects and thesaurus projects, to extract features from uploaded documents. These features are then used to:

    • Allow the user to see and use some of them—named entities, main phrases, keywords, lemmas, syncons, main lemmas, main syncon labels, main topics, collectively dubbed "entities and tokens"—to search and drill-down documents to make any sort of interesting discovery about them.
    • Find related documents.

    • Be the background information of the visible text. This in turn allows to:

      • In categorization, extraction and thesaurus projects:

        • Automatically and invisibly enrich the annotation of any portion of a text with all the features that NL Core extracted from it. This enrichment affects the training of models, because model learn from a lot of information more than the simple text.
        • In extraction projects, enable automatic propagation of annotations and active learning.
        • In thesaurus projects, make it possible to suggest broader, narrower or related labels and concepts.

  • In categorization, extraction and thesaurus projects to be embedded in every generated model so to be available for feature extraction whenever the model is used in the authoring application or in an NL Flow workflow.

  • In knowledge graph customization projects, to provide the baseline knowledge graph.

Computing slots

A computing slot is a certain amount of computing resources (CPU and RAM) reserved for a tech version's instance of NL Core for a language. The size of the individual slot, that is the amount of CPU and RAM, and the number of slots—all slots have the same size—is configured at installation time.

A tech version needs at least as many computing slots as the languages supported, because at least one instance of NL Core is required for each language.
If there are slots available, however, it is possible to allocate more slots to a language, increasing the number of instances of NL Core when more computing power is needed to analyze documents during uploads and experiments.

Note

Only active tech versions need and occupy slots, offline and incomplete tech versions don't.

Multiple tech versions can be active at the same time as long as there are enough available slots to accommodate them all.