General Architecture for Text Engineering or GATE is a Java software toolkit originally developed at the University of Sheffield since 1995 and now used worldwide by a wide community of scientists, companies, teachers and students for all sorts of natural language processing tasks, including information extraction in many languages.
| GATE | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Sheffield NLP research group |
| Initial release | ? |
| Stable release | 8.6.1 (January 17, 2020) [±] |
| Preview release | 9.0-SNAPSHOT (August 29, 2025 (Nightly builds released every day)) [±] |
| Repository | |
| Written in | ? |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Available in | English |
| Type | Text mining |
| License | LGPL |
| Website | http://gate.ac.uk/ |
GATE comprises an architecture, a free open source API, framework and graphical development environment.
GATE community and research is involved in several European research projects including TAO and SEKT.
Features
GATE includes an information extraction system called ANNIE (A Nearly-New Information Extraction System) which is a set of modules comprising a tokenizer, a gazetteer, a sentence splitter, a part of speech tagger, a named entities transducer and a coreference tagger.
Languages currently handled in GATE include English, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, French, German, Hindi, Cebuano, Romanian, Russian.
There is a large set of plugins for machine learning with Weka, RASP, MAXENT, SVM Light, for managing Ontologies like WordNet, for querying search engines like Google or Yahoo, for part of speech tagging with Brill or TreeTager, and many more.
GATE can handle input in various formats, such as TXT, HTML, XML, Doc, PDF documents, and Java Serial, PostgreSQL, Lucene, Oracle Databases with help of RDBMS storage over JDBC.
It also uses the JAPE (Java Annotation Patterns Engine) language for building rules in order to annotate documents with tags. A debugger, corpus benchmark and annotations comparator tools are also present.
Description of the graphical user interface
Each processing and language resource can have its own associated visual resource. When double clicked, the resource’s respective visual resource appears in the GATE GUI. The GATE GUI is divided into three visible parts (See Figure). One of them contains a tree that shows the loaded instances of resources. The one below this is used for various purposes - such as to display document features and that the execution is in progress. This part of the GUI is referred to as ”small”. The third and the largest part of the GUI is referred to as ”large”. On this figure, the central one is the document with annotations shown in yellow and the vertical one shows the list of annotations used in the document.