  We describe the design and early implementation of an extensible,
component-based software architecture for natural language engineering
applications which interfaces with high performance distributed computing
services. The architecture leverages existing linguistic resource description
and discovery mechanisms based on metadata descriptions, combining these in a
compatible fashion with other software definition abstractions. Within this
architecture, application design is highly flexible, allowing disparate
components to be combined to suit the overall application functionality, and
formally described independently of processing concerns. An application
specification language provides abstraction from the programming environment
and allows ease of interface with high performance computational grids via a
broker.
