GATE Developer is a development environment that provides a rich set of graphical interactive tools for the creation, measurement and maintenance of software components for processing human language. GATE Developer is open source software, available under the GNU Lesser General Public Licence 3.0, and can be downloaded from this page. (GATE Developer and GATE Embedded are bundled, and in older distributions were refered to just as "GATE".)
Language processing software uses specialised data structures and algorithms such as annotation graphs, finite state machines or support vector machines. GATE Developer aids the creation of these complex structures, the visualisation of processing results, and the measurement of their accuracy relative to manually or semi-automatically produced results.
Developer is a specialist tool similar in purpose and character to a programmer's integrated development environment (which is one reason we call it "the Eclipse of natural language processing"). It is a complex and feature-rich tool that has been in continuous development since 1995.
The user guide has an example use case.
Place in the GATE Process
Creating (or more often adapting) the algorithms to analyse (or generate) text or speech is one of the key steps in the creation of any application that deals with human language. GATE Develop supports this creative process and creates processing pipelines that are then exported to GATE Teamware and/or GATE Cloud for e.g. quality control or parallelisation respectively.
- The Developer chapter in the user guide.
- The software distribution documentation tree.
- A large set of screen capture videos (sponsored by Matrixware).
- Developer is bundled with numerous components for common tasks; here's the core CREOLE plugins list; ask on the mailing list for other plugins.
- CREOLE includes ANNIE, an Information Extraction (or Semantic Annotation) system, which has been customised for many purposes in many languages.
- There are also many scientific publications about Developer and its usage.
(If you've got the bandwidth, you'd be better off at the movies.)