GATE

GATE 2: 18-month report

Hamish Cunningham, Valentin Tablan, Cristian Ursu, Kalina Bontcheva, 1st January, 2001

This is the second in a series of progress reports for the GATE 2 project (EPSRC grant GR/M31699, running from July 1999 to summer 2002). The previous report is here. Our starting points are the original GATE project (GR/K25267 - available at http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/nlp/gate/), and the proposal document for the new project.

Our work over the last 9 months, from April through December 2000 has been to implement the second version of the GATE system in order to satisfy as many as possible of the requirements identified in the first phase of the project.

Use cases

We have identified a number requirements for Software Architecture for Language Engineering (SALE); the version of the system at half-way through the project meets (partially or completely) the following subset:

  1. Processing resources
    1. Locating, loading and initialising components from local and non-local machines. [Fully met]
    2. Executing processing components, serially or in parallel. [Partially met]
    3. Representing information about components. [Fully met]
    4. Factoring out commonalities amongst components.
  2. Language Resources, corpora and annotation
    1. Accessing data components.
    2. Managing collections of documents (including recordings) and their formats. [Partially met]
    3. Representing information about text and speech. [Fully met]
    4. Representing information about language.
    5. Indexing and retrieving information. [Partially met]
  3. Methods and applications
    1. Method support
      • FST, unification and statistics over information. [Partially met]
      • Comparing different versions of information. [Partially met]
    2. Application issues
      • Storing information. [Partially met]
      • Deployment and embedding. [Fully met]
    3. Development issues
      • Interoperation with other infrastructures. [Partially met]
      • Viewing and editing data components and information. [Partially met]
      • UI access to architectural facilities (development environments). [Partially met]

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