Representational State Transfer, or REST, is a term used to describe a software architectural style. This style is typically used for web services and web APIs. When it comes to text analytics, Representational State Transfer refers to the process of retrieving data from a text corpus, or set of documents. This data can be in the form of unstructured text, structured data, or even audio or video files.
There are three main aspects to Representational State Transfer: resources, verbs, and representations.
Resources are the pieces of information that can be retrieved from a text corpus. These can be things like individual words, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs. In order to retrieve a resource from a text corpus, a client sends a request to a server. The server then processes the request and sends back the requested resource.
Verbs are the actions that can be performed on resources. The most common verb used in text analytics is the GET verb, which simply retrieves a resource from a text corpus. Other verbs that are sometimes used include POST (which creates a new resource), PUT (which updates an existing resource), and DELETE (which deletes a resource).
Representations are the format in which resources are returned to the client. The most common format for representations is JSON, but other formats such as XML and CSV are also sometimes used.
REST is just one of many software architectural styles that can be used for building web services and web APIs. Other popular styles include SOAP and RPC. Representational State Transfer has become the preferred style for many developers due to its simplicity and flexibility.
When it comes to text analytics, Representational State Transfer can be used to retrieve any type of data from a text corpus. This data can then be used for various purposes such as sentiment analysis, topic modeling, or text classification.
REST is not the only way to retrieve data from a text corpus. Other methods such as streaming and file transfer can also be used. However, Representational State Transfer is often the preferred method due to its simplicity and flexibility.