GATE Version 3.1 release (April 2006)

1. Major new features

1.1. Support for UIMA

UIMA (http://www.research.ibm.com/UIMA/) is a language processing framework developed by IBM. UIMA and GATE share some functionality but are complementary in most respects. GATE now provides an interoperability layer to allow UIMA applications to include GATE components in their processing and vice-versa. For full information, see chapter 14 of the User Guide.

1.2. New Ontology API

The ontology layer has been rewritten in order to provide an abstraction layer between the model representation and the tools used for input and output of the various representation formats. An implementation that uses Jena 2 (http://jena.sourceforge.net/ontology) for reading and writing OWL and RDF(S) is provided.

1.3. Ontotext Japec Compiler

Japec is a compiler for JAPE grammars developed by Ontotext Lab. It has some limitations compared to the standard JAPE transducer implementation, but can run JAPE grammars up to five times as fast. By default, GATE still uses the stable JAPE implementation, but if you want to experiment with Japec, see section 9.27 of the User Guide.

2. Other new features and improvements

• Addition of a new JAPE matching style "all". This is similar to Brill, but once all rules from a given start point have matched, the matching will continue from the next offset to the current one, rather than from the position in the document where the longest match finishes. More details can be found in Section 7.2.
• Limited support for loading PDF and Microsoft Word document formats. Only the text is extracted from the documents, no formatting information is preserved.
• The Buchart parser has been deprecated and replaced by a new plugin called SUPPLE - the Sheffield University Prolog Parser for Language Engineering. Full details, including information on how to move your application from Buchart to SUPPLE, is in section 9.12.
• The Hepple POS Tagger is now open-source. The source code has been included in the GATE distribution, under src/hepple/postag. More information about the POS Tagger can be found in Section 8.4.
• Minipar is now supported on Windows. minipar-windows.exe, a modified version of pdemo.cpp is added under the gate/plugins/minipar directory to allow users to run Minipar on windows platform. While using Minipar on Windows, this binary should be provided as a value for miniparBinary parameter. For full information on Minipar in GATE, see section 9.10 of the User Guide.
• The XmlGateFormat writer(Save As Xml from GATE GUI, gate.Document.toXml() from GATE API) and reader have been modified to write and read GATE annotation IDs. For backward compatibility reasons the old reader has been kept. This change fixes a bug which manifested in the following situation: If a GATE document had annotations carrying features of which values were numbers representing other GATE annotation IDs, after a save and a reload of the document to and from XML, the former values of the features could have become invalid by pointing to other annotations. By saving and restoring the GATE annotation ID, the former consistency of the GATE document is maintained. For more information, see Section 6.5.2 of the User Guide.
• The NP chunker and chemistry tagger plugins have been updated. Mark Greenwood has relicenced them under the LGPL, so their source code has been moved into the GATE distribution. See sections 9.3 and 9.15 for details.
• The Tree Tagger wrapper has been updated with an option to be less strict when characters that cannot be represented in the tagger's encoding are encountered in the document. Details are in section 9.7.
• JAPE Transducers can be serialized into binary files. The option to load serialized version of JAPE Transducer (an init-time parameter binaryGrammarURL) is also implemented which can be used as an alternative to the parameter grammarURL. More information can be found in Section 7.7.
• On Mac OS, GATE now behaves more naturally. The application menu items and keyboard shortcuts for About and Preferences now do what you would expect, and exiting GATE with command-Q or the Quit menu item properly saves your options and current session.
• Updated versions of Weka (3.4.6) and Maxent (2.4.0).
• Optimisation in gate.creole.ml: the conversion of AnnotationSet into ML examples is now faster.
• It is now possible to create your own implementation of Annotation, and have GATE use this instead of the default implementation. See AnnotationFactory and AnnotationSetImpl in the gate.annotation package for details.

3. Bug fixes

• The Tree Tagger wrapper has been updated in order to run under Windows. See 9.7.
• The SUPPLE parser has been made more user-friendly. It now produces more helpful error messages if things go wrong. Note that you will need to update any saved applications that include SUPPLE to work with this version - see section 9.12 of the User Guide for details.
• Miscellaneous fixes in the Ontotext JapeC compiler.
• Optimization : the creation of a Document is much faster.
• Google plugin: The optional pagesToExclude parameter was causing a NullPointerException when left empty at run time. Full details about the plugin functionality can be found in section 9.20.
• Minipar, SUPPLE, TreeTagger: These plugins that call external processes have been fixed to cope better with path names that contain spaces. Note that some of the external tools themselves still have problems handling spaces in file names, but these are beyond our control to fix. If you want to use any of these plugins, be sure to read the documentation to see if they have any such restrictions.
• When using a non-default location for GATE configuration files, the configuration data is saved back to the correct location when GATE exits. Previously the default locations were always used.
• Jape Debugger: ConcurrentModificationException in JAPE debugger. The JAPE debugger was generating a ConcurrentModificationException during an attempt to run ANNIE. There is no exception when running without the debugger enabled. As result of fixing one unnesesary and incorrect callback to debugger was removed from SinglePhaseTransducer class.
• Plus many other small bugfixes...