GATE 2: 9-month report

Hamish Cunningham, Kalina Bontcheva, Valentin Tablan, Yorick Wilks, 31st March, 2000

This is the first in a series of progress reports for the GATE 2 project (EPSRC grant GR/M31699, running from July 1999 to summer 2002). 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.

In sum, our aim is to relieve language processing R&D workers from as much of the burden of routine software engineering as possible. The original GATE project can claim to have achieved this goal within the limited arena of certain types of language analysis program. The new project seeks to reach a wider audience, and to move GATE onto the Web using Java technology.

Our work over the last 9 months has covered 4 areas:

1. the development of several initial prototypes, linking up with the AVENTINUS, EUDICO and LOTTIE projects (you can see some of the stuff we did on our demos page);
2. a comprehensive requirements analysis for GATE 2, available from the publications page;
3. a start on developing the new version, directed top-down by the requirements analysis and bottom-up by the prototype code base (initial releases are available in Sheffield on the internal server);
4. setting up the new gate.ac.uk website for distribution of the system, and net-based access to NLP resources within GATE.