09 December 2009

World-leading GATE software celebrates 15th birthday

Academics at the Department of Computer Science are celebrating the 15th birthday of their unique software this week (8 December 2009), which helps make sense of the web and social and mass media.

The General Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE) software can help to offer solutions for any number of problems, from the credit crunch to the swine flu pandemic, by providing a quicker, more accurate method of sifting through masses of information on the web.

To mark the occasion, the research team behind the software will be launching a brand new version of GATE, along with a new website and the announcement of new commercial partnerships.

From the problems of the credit crunch to the flu pandemic, we often require better ways to sift through a mass of information on the web. Sheffield's Natural Language Processing group supplies the GATE software for different sorts of human language processing tasks, often helping to analyse and sort through social media and other data on the web, including in digital libraries or on company intranets.

Having secured more than £5 million in external funding over the last 15 years, the software has many thousands of users around the world in areas ranging from identity theft prevention to medical research. For example, cancer research staff at the World Health Organisation who are searching for gene disease associations use GATE to improve their statistical models by analysing published research that was previously inaccessible due to its scale and complexity.

Professor Hamish Cunningham, from the Department of Computer Science, is Project Leader for GATE. He said: "TV isn't killing conversation any more – now it's texts, tweets, blogs and the like which are becoming rooted in our communication culture. This is good news for GATE, as is the fact that more and more organisations are moving to free software like ours. We've been lucky enough to give something of value back to those who funded our research. All in all, it looks like GATE will still be around in another 15 years."

For more details see the GATE web site.