GATE, a General Architecture for Text Engineering

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• GATE, a General Architecture for Text Engineering
• http//gate.ac.uk/ http//nlp.shef.ac.uk/
• Hamish Cunningham
• Department of Computer Science, University of
  Sheffield
• ENST, Paris, 20/1/2003
• Natural Language Engineering in Sheffield
• One of the largest Human Language Technology
  groups in the EU
• 50 staff in Language and Speech Processing 25 in
  Information Retrieval, including 6 professors
• A focus on scientific method in AI (participate
  in all the leading quantitative evaluation
  programmes in the US)
• A focus on engineering high-quality open-source
  software for applications and demonstrators

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•                                                
                                                  
                             
• GATE, a General Architecture for Text Engineering
• GATE is.
• An architectureA macro-level organisational
  picture for LE software systems.
• A frameworkFor programmers, GATE is an
  object-oriented class library that implements the
  architecture.
• A development environmentFor language
  engineers, computational linguists et al, GATE is
  a graphical development environment bundled with
  a set of tools for doing e.g. Information
  Extraction.
• Free software (LGPL). Mature robust software (in
  development since 1995). Download at
  http//gate.ac.uk/download
• Comes with
• Some free components... ...and wrappers for
  other people's components
• Tools for evaluation visualise/edit
  persistence IR IE dialogue ontologies etc.

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•                             Applications
  languages
• GATE has been used for a variety of applications,
  including
• MUMIS automatic creation of semantic indexes
  for multimedia programme material
• MUSE a multi-genre IE system
• EMILLE a 70 million word corpus of Indic
  languages
• Metadata for Medline (at Merck)
• Creation of metadata for Semantic Web Services
  documentation using NLG
• HSE summarisation of health and safety
  information from company reports
• OldBaileyIE NE recognition on 17th century Old
  Bailey Court reports.
• AKT language technology in knowledge management
• AMITIES call centre automation
• Digital libraries / e-philology for ancient
  languages researchers
• Various Medical Informatics and database
  technology projects
• IE in Romanian, Bulgarian, Greek, Bengali,
  Spanish, Swedish, German, Italian, and French
  (Arabic, Chinese and Russian next year)

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Some users

• At time of writing a representative fraction of
  GATE users includes
• Longman Pearson publishing, UK
• BT Exact Technologies, UK
• Merck KgAa, Germany
• Canon Europe, UK
• Knight Ridder (the second biggest US news
  publisher)
• BBN Technologies, US
• Sirma AI Ltd., Bulgaria
• Resco AB, Sweden/Finland/Germany
• Glaxo Smith Kline Plc drug-based navigation of
  Medline abstracts
• Master Foods NV extraction of commodities events
  from news
• the American National Corpus project, US
• Imperial College, London, the University of
  Manchester, Queen Mary College, UMIST, the
  University of Karlsruhe, Vassar College, ISI /
  the University of Southern California and a large
  number of other UK, US and EU Universities
• the Perseus Digital Library project, Tufts
  University, US.

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•                                                
                                                  
                             
• Architectural principles
• Non-prescriptive, theory neutral (strength and
  weakness)
• Re-use, interoperation, not reimplementation
  (e.g. diverse XML support, integration of tools
  like Protégé, Jena and Weka)
• (Almost) everything is a component, and
  component sets are user-extendable
• Component-based development
• An OO way of chunking software Java Beans
• GATE components CREOLE modified Java Beans
  (Collection of REusable Objects for Language
  Engineering)
• The minimal component 10 lines of Java, 10
  lines of XML, 1 URL.

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•                                                
                                                  
                             
• GATE Language Resources
• GATE LRs are documents, ontologies, corpora,
  lexicons,
• Documents / corpora
• GATE documents loaded from local files or the
  web...
• Diverse document formats text, html, XML,
  email, RTF, SGML.
• Processing Resourcres
• Algorithmic components knows as PRs beans with
  execute methods.
• All PRs can handle Unicode data by default.
• Clear distinction between code and data (simple
  repurposing).
• 20-30 freebies with GATE
• e.g. Named entity recognition WordNet Protégé
  Ontology OntoGazetteer DAMLOIL export
  Information Retrieval based on Lucene

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Visual Resources
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Displaying Coreference Information
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Displaying Syntactic Information
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Lexicon Support WordNet example
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A Language AnalysisExample
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Building IE Components in GATE (1) The ANNIE
system a reusable and easily extendable set of
components
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•  Building IE Components in GATE (2)
• JAPE a Java Annotation Patterns Engine
• Light, robust regular-expression-based
  processing
• Cascaded finite state transduction
• Low-overhead development of new components
• Rule Company1
• Priority 25
• (
• ( Token.orthography upperInitial )
• Lookup.kind companyDesignator
• )companyMatch
• --gt
• companyMatch.NamedEntity kind
  company, rule Company1

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•  Performance Evaluation
• At document level annotation diff
• At corpus level corpus benchmark tool
  tracking systems performance over time

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Regression Testing Corpus Benchmark Tool
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The Semantic Web and GATE

• GATE is being used for development of
  (semi-)automatic methods for
• linking web pages to Ontologies using
  Information Extraction
• learning and evolving Ontologies via IE and
  lexical semantic network traversal.

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Populating Ontologies with IE
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Protégé and Ontology Management
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Information Retrieval Support Based on the
Lucene IR engine
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Editing Multilingual Data

•                      
• GATE Unicode Kit (GUK)
• Java provides no special support for text input
  (this may change)
• Support for defining additional Input
  Methods (IMs)
• currently 30 IMs for 17 languages
• Pluggable in other applications

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Processing Multilingual Data All the
visualisation and editing tools for ML LRs use
enhanced Java facilities
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Dialogue Systems

• GATE is being used in the Amities project for
  automating call centres
• Creation of dialogue processing server
  components to run in the Galaxy Communicator
  architecture
• Easy adaptation of the portable IE components to
  work on noisy ASR output
• Robustness and speed of GATE components vital
  for real-time dialogue systems

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The MUMIS project

• Multimedia Indexing and Searching Environment
• Composite index of a multimedia programme from
  multiple sources in different languages
• ASR, video processing, information extraction
  (Dutch, English, German), merging, user interface
• University of Twente/CTIT, University of
  Sheffield, University of Nijmegen, DFKI, MPI,
  ESTEAM AB, VDA
• Yorick Wilks, Hamish Cunningham, Horacio Saggion,
  Kalina Bontcheva, Diana Maynard, Oana Hamza,
  Cristian Ursu

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The Whole Picture
Ontology Lexicon
IE
DE
Formal Text
Formal Text
Final Annotations
Formal Text
IE
Formal Text
NL
Formal Text
Formal Text
Formal Text
EN
Formal Text
Formal Text
Text Sources
IE
Video Audio Signal
Query
Formal Text
Formal Text
Formal Text
Formal Text
Formal Text
Formal Text
Formal Text
Formal Text
Formal Text
Formal Text
Formal Text
Formal Text
Formal Text
Formal Text
Formal Text
Formal Text
Formal Text
Formal Text
Multimedia Data Base
Formal Text
Speech Signals
Formal Text
User Interface
Trans criptions
ASR
Results
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User Interface
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Play
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•                                                
                                                  
                             
• Conclusion
• GATE an infrastructure that lowers the overhead
  of creating embedding robust NLP components
• Further information http//gate.ac.uk/
• Online demos, tutorials and documentation
• Software downloads
• Talks and papers