7th GATE Training Course: Mining social media content with GATE

The 7th GATE training course will be held on 9-13 June 2014 at the University of Sheffield, UK. Early registration deadline is 30 April 2014.

This event will follow a similar format to that of earlier GATE courses, but with only one track Monday to Thursday, and two parallel tracks on Friday, all delivered by the GATE development team. For more information about the schedule, course materials, travel, accommodation, local information etc. please see the FIG participants wiki.

The focus this year in particular will be on mining social media content with GATE. The hands on exercises will be focused on analysing tweets, blogs, and other social media content.

Single track from Monday to Thursday (9am - 5pm):

Monday: Module 1: Basic Information Extraction with GATE
- Intro to GATE + Information Extraction (IE)
- Corpus Annotation and Evaluation (examples on blogs)
- Writing Information Extraction Patterns with JAPE (examples on news and blogs)

Tuesday: Module 2: Using GATE for social media analysis
- Challenges for analysing social media, GATE for social media
- Twitter intro + JSON structure
- Language identification, tokenisation for Twitter
- POS tagging and Information Extraction for Twitter

Wednesday: Module 3: Advanced IE and Training Machine Learning Models within GATE
- Useful GATE components (plugins)
- Advanced Information Extraction
- Machine Learning for IE

Thursday: Module 4: Opinion Mining, Crowdsourcing, and GATE Cloud/MIMIR
- Challenges of opinion mining in social media
- Opinion mining components and applications in GATE
- Crowdsourcing annotated social media content with the GATE crowdsourcing plugin
- GATE Cloud, deploying your own IE pipeline at scale (how to process 5 millions tweets in 30 mins)
- GATE Mimir - how to index and search semantically annotated social media streams

On Friday, there is a choice of modules (9am - 5pm):

Module 5: GATE for developers
- Basic GATE Embedded
- Writing your own plugin
- GATE in production - multi-threading, web applications, etc.

Module 6: GATE Applications
- Building your own applications
- Examples of some current GATE applications: social media summarisation, visualisation, Linked Open Data for IE, and more

Please note that these two modules are run in parallel, so you can only attend one of them. You must state on the booking form which module you would like to follow on Friday. Note that you will be expected to have some programming experience and knowledge of Java to follow Module 5 on the Friday. No particular expertise is needed for Module 6.

Registration

Please fill in this online registration form and email it back to gate-fig@lists.dcs.shef.ac.uk. You will then be sent details about payment.

The registration fee includes registration for all modules, lunches, tea/coffee and course materials.

Free Commercial Consultancy

There will also be an opportunity for anyone registered at the commercial rate to get a free 1 hour consultancy session with one of our team, during the week of the course. This could entail discussions about scoping a project, tackling a particular problem in GATE that you're experiencing, or some general advice on your work. Please indicate on the booking form if you would like to take advantage of this, and some indication of the topic(s) you'd like to discuss. Note that places for consultancy are strictly limited and subject to availability, and will operate on a first-come first-served basis.

Venue and accommodation

The course will be held on the main campus of the University of Sheffield. Further information about the venue and accommodation is available on the course wiki page.