GATE for Scientists

GATE has these benefits for scientists performing experiments with language and computation:

• Repeatability
  By making it easier to repeat comparable experiments across different sites and platforms GATE makes it easier to be sure that a particular result is not a glitch.
• Quantitative evaluation
  GATE includes a built-in system for comparing annotation data on documents and generating quantitative metrics such as precision and recall. There is no science without measurement! (But see also below.)
• Collaboration
  Multi-site collaboration puts a premium on software integration and portability, both areas which GATE-based software excels.
• Reuse not reinvention
  Language processing resources that have been integrated in GATE are likely to have a longer working life and to be reused more often because using them does not require learning fresh installation and usage conventions for every tool.

The various scientific and engineering disciplines to which GATE is relevant are:

1. Computational Linguistics: part of the science of language that uses computation as an investigative tool.
2. Natural Language Processing: part of the science of computation whose subject matter is data structures and algorithms for human language processing.
3. Language Engineering: building language processing systems whose cost and outputs are measurable and predictable.