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Introduction

Welcome to the manual of expert.ai Platform NL Flow.

NL Flow is the part of expert.ai Platform where users manage workflows.
It is made of:

  1. The designer, a Web application where users create and manage workflows typically—but not necessarily—based on linguistic models designed with Platform's authoring application or with Studio.
  2. One or more runtimes hosting published workflows and allowing to use them to analyze documents with any client program via REST API calls.

To practically use a linguistic model, it needs to be put inside a workflow and the workflow must be published in one or multiple runtimes.

A workflow does not necessarily coincide with a model: it can be as simple as a model or as complex as your analysis needs, with more models, parallel branches, pre-processors and post-processors taken from those already available or written in JavaScript and Python. The workflow can also have conditional paths and loops.
Custom components—for example to integrate external services like large generative models or perform use-case specific manipulation of the data—can be built using a SDK.

It is possible to have multiple, independent, flows in the same workflow: all the flows receive the same input while the overall output of the workflow is the concatenation of the output of the individual flows.

This manual has two sections:

  • How-to guide: all the things you can do with the designer Web application.
  • Reference guide: the description of workflow building blocks and definitions.

The REST API that allows you to use workflows programmatically is described in a separate manual.