GATE: a full-lifecycle open source solution for text processing

GATE is over 15 years old and is in active use for all types of computational task involving human language. GATE excels at text analysis of all shapes and sizes. From large corporations to small startups, from €multi-million research consortia to undergraduate projects, their user community is the largest and most diverse of any system of this type, and is spread across all but one of the continents (apparently not in Antartica).

Core GATE is open source free software; users can obtain free support from the user and developer community via GATE.ac.uk or on a commercial basis from their industrial partners. They are the biggest open source language processing project with a development team more than double the size of the largest comparable projects (many of which are integrated with GATE). More than €5 million has been invested in GATE development; their objective is to make sure that this continues to be money well spent for all GATE’s users.

This note summarises the GATE software and process and gives examples of some of their uses. We believe that GATE is the leading system of its type, but as scientists we have to advise you not to take our word for it; that’s why we’ve measured our software in many of the competitive evaluations over the last decade-and-a-half (MUC, TREC, ACE, DUC, …). We invite you to give it a try, to get involved with the GATE community, and to contribute to human language science, engineering and development.