General Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE)

General Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE) is a development environment for writing software that can process human-language text. In particular, GATE is used for computational language processing and text mining.

GATE helps scientists and engineers to define and determine organizational structures for language processing, and facilitates the embedding of language processing capabilities in applications. The GATE development environment includes a GUI (graphical user interface) to streamline the learning curve.

GATE was conceived on the premise that the elements of software systems that process natural language can be broken down into three categories, also known as flavors:

• Language Resources, which represent lexicons and related entities.
• Processing Resources, which represent algorithms.
• Visual Resources, which represent the components of GUIs.

GATE was originally developed at the University of Sheffield beginning in 1995, and is now used worldwide by scientists, engineers, companies, teachers, and students.