Press Releases

December 8th 2009: World-leading software celebrates 15th birthday

[See also

• the official release from the University media centre.
• Ontotext's announcement
• Matrixware's announcement ]

What do the credit crunch and the flu pandemic have in common? Better ways to sift through information would help in both cases, and Sheffield's Natural Language Processing group have developed a world-leading reputation for their General Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE), which is used to help make sense of the web, social and mass media, etc.

The software celebrates its 15th birthday this week with a new release, revamped website, and commercial partnerships that should ensure a lively future in both research and development alike. Having secured more than £5 million in external funding over the years the research team in Sheffield is now complemented by a vibrant community of users worldwide.

"More and more organisations are moving to open source and free software like Linux, Apache or GATE," says project leader Prof. Hamish Cunningham of the Computer Science Department, "but open source alone is not enough. Many users need 24/7 support and bespoke development. Now that several commercial organisations are supplying professional services for GATE we can offer everything from a bit of free email advice to an enterprise-level solution."

GATE has many thousands of users around the world in areas ranging from identity theft prevention to medical research. For example, cancer research staff at the World Health Organisation who are searching for gene-disease associations use GATE to improve their statistical models by analysing published research that was previously inaccessible due to its scale and complexity. Results so far indicate a potential saving in wet lab work of hundreds of thousands of euros.

"We've been lucky enough to give something of value back to the taxpayers who funded our research. We also got lucky with the explosions of first the web and now social networking. TV isn't killing conversation any more – now it's texts, tweets, blogs and the like which are becoming rooted in our communication culture. Which is good news for GATE, which looks like it will still be around in another 15 years", said Prof. Cunningham.

Investment in GATE has come from EPSRC, BBSRC, AHRC, JISC, the European Commission, and commercial sponsors like IBM, Ontotext and Matrixware. As well as the new services offered by industry, the Information Retrieval Facility supports GATE-based services for research on their supercomputer infrastructure.

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