A method, an apparatus and an article of manufacture for customizing a natural language processing engine. The method includes enabling selection of one or more parameters of a desired natural language processing task, the one or more parameters intended for use by a trained and an untrained user, mapping the one or more selected parameters to a collection of one or more intervals of an input parameter to an optimization algorithm, and applying the optimization algorithm with the collection of one or more intervals of an input parameter to a model used by a natural language processing engine to produce a customized model.