14 January 2011

New GATE grant for Kalina Bontcheva

Dr. Kalina Bontcheva has received a research grant (£88,000) to further develop the widely-used General Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE) for cloud computing.

When you plug your fridge into the mains electricity supply you don't worry about all the technology sitting behind the wall socket - it just works. Cloud computing is starting to supply IT in a similar fashion. No more worrying about backups, no more hours spent configuring a new or repaired machine - just plug into the network, fire up your web browser and away you go.

Researchers have tougher and more specialised IT needs than most, so to realise the same ease of use that the cloud now provides for email or word processing requires work in several areas. One of these areas is to adapt existing established research tools to the cloud, and that is what this project will do. Our tool is called GATE, a General Architecture for Text Engineering. Over the last decade Sheffield's GATE system has become a world-leader for research and development of text mining algorithms.

GATE provides four systems to support scientists experimenting with new text mining algorithms and developers using text mining in their applications:

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• GATE Developer: an integrated development environment for language processing components
  
• GATE Embedded: an object library optimised for inclusion in diverse applications
  
• GATE Teamware: a collaborative annotation environment for high
  volume web-based semantic annotation projects built around a workflow engine
  
• GATE Mimir: (Multi-paradigm Information Management Index and
  Repository) a massively scaleable multi-paradigm index