1. GATE and the Semantic Web
                                                                                                                           
GATE and the Semantic Web
Hamish Cunningham, Kalina Bontcheva, Wim Peters, Marin Dimitrov1, Atanas Kiryakov1, Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield 1OntoText Lab, Sirma AI Ltd.
Brief intro to GATE (a General Architecture for Text Engineering),
Hand waving about LT and the Semantic Web,
Demo
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2. A Ubiquitous Permeable Web
                                                                                                                           
A Ubiquitous Permeable Web
The next generation of the web must be:
ubiquitous: semantics for every device, every organisation, every individual;
permeable: allow contextual data to penetrate and persist;
companionable: able to engage with us via multiple natural modalities.
Roles for Language Technology:
discovery of semantics (ubiquity);
mediating between context and personal semantic memories (permeability);
conversing with people and the semantic web (companionableness).
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3. Critical Mass for the Semantic Web
                                                                                                                           
Critical Mass for the Semantic Web
The SW: machine processable, repurposable data to compliment hypertext
But: semantics = % of the Web
How to achieve critical mass? Huge scale automatic annotation. Requirements:
Huge scale: – freely available to all EU citizens – distributed (over a Grid) – re-purposeable (delivered as Web Services)
Portability and robustness via: – simple and therefore shallow HLT methods – +ve and –ve learning – analogs of IPSEs for computer-literate users
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4.                                                                                                                            
GATE is:
An architecture A macro-level organisational picture for LE software systems.
A framework For programmers, GATE is an object-oriented class library that implements the architecture.
A development environment For language engineers, computational linguists et al, GATE is a graphical development environment bundled with a set of tools for doing e.g. Information Extraction.
Some free components and wrappers for other people's components
Tools for: evaluation; visualisation/edit; persistence; IR; IE; dialogue; ontologies; etc.
Free software (LGPL). Download at
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5. Architectural principles
                                                                                                                           
Architectural principles
Non-prescriptive, theory neutral (strength and weakness)
Re-use, interoperation, not reimplementation (e.g. v1 used LT-NSL for SGML input; v2 talks to other XML-based systems, APIs and standards)
(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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6. Displaying Multilingual Data
                                                                                                                           
Displaying Multilingual Data
All the visualisation and editing tools for ML LRs use enhanced Java facilities:
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7. GATE demo Components and the main UI; the resources tree
                                                                                                                           
GATE demo
Components and the main UI; the resources tree
Document formats, databases
IE, IR, annotation, evaluation, WordNet
Ontologies, OntoGazetteer, Protégé, DAML export
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