Appendix C
Obsolete CREOLE Plugins [#]

These plugins should not be needed for new development with GATE, but are documented here in case they are required by an old application. Note that the obsolete plugins do not appear in GATE’s plugin manager by default.

C.1 Ontotext JapeC Compiler [#]

Note: the JapeC compiler does not currently support the new JAPE language features introduced in July–September 2008. If you need to use negation, the @length and @string accessors, the contextual operators within and contains, or any comparison operators other than ==, then you will need to use the standard JAPE transducer instead of JapeC.

JapeC is an alternative implementation of the JAPE language which works by compiling JAPE grammars into Java code. Compared to the standard implementation, these compiled grammars can be several times faster to run. At Ontotext, a modified version of the ANNIE sentence splitter using compiled grammars has been found to run up to five times as fast as the standard version. The compiler can be invoked manually from the command line, or used through the ‘Ontotext Japec Compiler’ PR in the Jape_Compiler plugin.

The ‘Ontotext Japec Transducer’ (com.ontotext.gate.japec.JapecTransducer) is a processing resource that is designed to be an alternative to the original Jape Transducer. You can simply replace gate.creole.Transducer with com.ontotext.gate.japec.JapecTransducer in your gate application and it should work as expected.

The Japec transducer takes the same parameters as the standard JAPE transducer:

grammarURL

the URL from which the grammar is to be loaded. Note that the Japec Transducer will only work on file: URLs. Also, the alternative binaryGrammarURL parameter of the standard transducer is not supported.

encoding

the character encoding used to load the grammars.

ontology

the ontology used for ontolog-aware transduction.

Its runtime parameters are likewise the same as those of the standard transducer:

document

the document to process.

inputASName

name of the AnnotationSet from which input annotations to the transducer are read.

outputASName

name of the AnnotationSet to which output annotations from the transducer are written.

The Japec compiler itself is written in Haskell. Compiled binaries are provided for Windows, Linux (x86) and Mac OS X (PowerPC), so no Haskell interpreter is required to run Japec on these platforms. For other platforms, or if you make changes to the compiler source code, you can build the compiler yourself using the Ant build file in the Jape_Compiler plugin directory. You will need to install the latest version of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler¹ and associated libraries. The japec compiler can then be built by running:

from the Jape_Compiler plugin directory.

C.2 Google Plugin [#]

This plugin is no longer operational because the functionality, provided by Google, on which it depends, is no longer available.

C.3 Yahoo Plugin [#]

The Yahoo API is now integrated with GATE, and can be used as a PR-based plugin. This plugin, ‘Web_Search_Yahoo’, allows the user to query Yahoo and build a document corpus that contains the search results returned by Yahoo for the query. For more information about the Yahoo API please refer to http://developer.yahoo.com/search/. In order to use the Yahoo PR, you need to obtain an application ID.

The Yahoo PR can be used for a number of different application scenarios. For example, one use case is where a user wants to find the different named entities that can be associated with a particular individual. In this example, the user could build a collection of documents by querying Yahoo with the individual’s name and then running ANNIE over the collection. This would annotate the results and show the different Organization, Location and other entities that are associated with the query.

C.3.1 Using the YahooPR

In order to use the PR, you first need to load the plugin using the GATE Developer plugin manager. Once the PR is loaded, it can be initialized by creating an instance of a new PR. Here you need to specify the Yahoo Application ID. Please use the license key assigned to you by registering with Yahoo.

Once the Yahoo PR is initialized, it can be placed in a pipeline or a conditional pipeline application. This pipeline would contain the instance of the Yahoo PR just initialized as above. There are a number of parameters to be set at runtime:

• corpus: The corpus used by the plugin to add or append documents from the Web.
• corpusAppendMode: If set to true, will append documents to the corpus. If set to false, will remove preexisting documents from the corpus, before adding the documents newly fetched by the PR
• limit: A limit on the results returned by the search. Default set to 10.
• pagesToExclude: This is an optional parameter. It is a list with URLs not to be included in the search.
• query: The query sent to Yahoo. It is in the format accepted by Yahoo.

Once the required parameters are set we can run the pipeline. This will then download all the URLs in the results and create a document for each. These documents would be added to the corpus.

C.4 Gazetteer Visual Resource - GAZE [#]

Gaze is a tool for editing the gazetteer lists , definitions and mapping to ontology. It is suitable for use both for Plain/Linear Gazetteers (Default and Hash Gazetteers) and Ontology-enabled Gazetteers (OntoGazetteer). The Gazetteer PR associated with the viewer is reinitialised every time a save operation is performed. Note that GAZE does not scale up to very large lists (we suggest not using it to view over 40,000 entries and not to copy inside more than 10, 000 entries).

Gaze is part of and provided by the ANNIE plugin. To make it possible to visualize gazetteers with the Gaze visualizer, the ANNIE plugin must be loaded first. Double clicking on a gazetteer PR that uses a gazetteer definition (index) file will display the contents of the gazetteer in the main window. The first pane will display the definition file, while the right pane will display whichever gazetteer list has been selected from it.

A gazetteer list can be modified simply by typing in it. it can be saved by clicking the Save button. When a list is saved, the whole gazetteer is automatically reinitialised (and will be ready for use in GATE immediately).

To edit the definition file, right click inside the pane and choose from the options (Inset, Edit, Remove). A pop-up menu will appear to guide you through the remaining process. Save the definition file by selecting Save. Again, the gazetteer will be reinitialised automatically.

C.4.1 Display Modes

The display mode depends on the type of gazetteer loaded in the VR. The mode in which Linear/Plain Gazetteers are loaded is called Linear/Plain Mode. In this mode, the Linear Definition is displayed in the left pane, and the Gazetteer List is displayed in the right pane. The Ontology/Extended mode is on when the displayed gazetteer is ontology-aware, which means that there exists a mapping between classes in the ontology and lists of phrases. Two more panes are displayed when in this mode. On the top in the left-most pane there is a tree view of the ontology hierarchy, and at the bottom the mapping definition is displayed. This section describes the Linear/Plain display mode, the Ontology/Extended mode is described in section 13.4.

Whenever a gazetteer PR that uses a gazetteer definition (index) file is loaded, the Gaze gazetteer visualisation will appear on double-click over the gazetteer in the Processing Resources branch of the Resources Tree.

C.4.2 Linear Definition Pane

This pane displays the nodes of the linear definition, and allows manipulation of the whole definition as a file, as well as the single nodes. Whenever a gazetteer list is modified, its node in the linear definition is coloured in red.

C.4.3 Linear Definition Toolbar

All the functionality explained in this section (New, Load, Save, Save As) is accessible also via File | Linear Definition in the menu bar of Gaze.

New – Pressing New invokes a file dialog where the location of the new definition is specified.

Load – Pressing Load invokes a file dialog, and after locating the new definition it is loaded by pressing Open.

Save – Pressing Save saves the definition to the location from which it has been read.

Save As – Pressing Save As allows another location to be chosen, and the definition saved there.

C.4.4 Operations on Linear Definition Nodes

Double-click node – Double-clicking on a definition node forces the displaying of the gazetteer list of the node in the right-most pane of the viewer.

Insert – On right-click over a node and choosing Insert, a dialog is displayed, requesting List, Major Type, Minor Type and Languages. The mandatory fields are List and Major Type. After pressing OK, a new linear node is added to the definition.

Remove – On right-click over a node and choosing Remove, the selected linear node is removed from the definition.

Edit – On right-click over a node and choosing Edit a dialog is displayed allowing changes of the fields List, Major Type, Minor Type and Languages.

C.4.5 Gazetteer List Pane

The gazetteer list pane has a toolbar with similar to the linear definition’s buttons (New, Load, Save, Save As). They work as predicted by their names and as explained in the Linear Definition Pane section, and are also accessible from File / Gazetteer List in the menu bar of Gaze. The only addition is Save All which saves all modified gazetteer lists. The editing of the gazetteer list is as simple as editing a text file. One could use Ctrl+A to select the whole list, Ctrl+C to copy the selected, Ctrl+V to paste it, Del to delete the selected text or a single character, etc.

C.4.6 Mapping Definition Pane

The mapping definition is displayed one mapping node per row. It consists of a gazetteer list, ontology URL, and class id. The content of the gazetteer list in the node is accessible through double-clicking. It is displayed in the Gazetteer List Pane. The toolbar allows the creation of a new definition (New), the loading of an existing one (Load), saving to the same or new location (Save/Save As). The functionality of the toolbar buttons is also available via File.

C.5 Google Translator PR [#]

The Google Translator PR allows users to translate their documents into many other languages using the Google translation service. It is based on the library called google-translate-api-java which is distributed under the LGPL licence and is available to download from http://code.google.com/p/google-api-translate-java/.

The PR is included in the plugin called Web_Translate_Google and depends on the Alignment plugin. (chapter 19).

If a user wants to translate an English document into French using the Google Translator PR. The first thing user needs to do is to create an instance of CompoundDocument with the English document as a member of it. The CompoundDocument in GATE provides a convenient way to group parallel documents that are translations of one other (see chapter 19 for more information). The idea is to use text from one of the members of the provided compound document, translate it using the Google translation service and create another member with the translated text. In the process, the PR also aligns the chunks of parallel texts. Here, a chunk could be a sentence, paragraph, section or the entire document.

siteReferrer is the only init-time parameter required to instantiate the PR. It has to be a valid website address. The value of this parameter is required to inform Google about the users using their service. There are seven run-time parameters:

• document - an instance of the compound document with a member document containing source text.
• sourceDocumentId - id of the source member document that needs to be translated.
• targetDocumentId - id of the target member document. This document is created by the PR and contains the translated text.
• sourceLanguage - the language of the source document.
• targetLanguage - the language into which the source document should be translated.
• unitOfTranslation - annotation type used for identifying chunks of texts to be translated and aligned.
• inputASName - name of the annotation set which contains unit of translations.
• alignmentFeatureName - name of the alignment feature used for storing the alignment information. The alignment feature is a document feature stored on the compound document.