Installing GATE:

If you are at the University of Pittsburgh, click here for GATE installation instructions. All others, see http://gate.ac.uk/download/index.html to download the latest version of GATE.

Most users here currently run GATE 4.0 and we recommend that you do so too. In our experience it has been more stable and has better rendering than previous versions that we
we have used on Windows and Linux platforms.

Pointing GATE on Windows to our XML Schemas:

If you run version 3.1 or 4.0, do the following. When you set up GATE for the first time to annotate, then once you have started GATE go to File->Manage CREOLE plugins. If it is already present in the list of "Known CREOLE directories", select the one for mpqa-annotation (the name may vary) and select the radio button for Load now. If you want GATE to be set up automatically for future annotation sessions, too, then select Load always as well. 

At the moment, the correct creole repository to use is:
http://www.cs.pitt.edu//mpqa/opinion-annotations/gate-annotation-new/

If you didn't find an mpqa CREOLE directory in the list, then use the button at the bottom of the popped up window to "Add a new CREOLE repository" and type in the above address. If this still doesn't work for you, then ask somebody in the lab for help.

In the 2.0 version of GATE, it is necessary to follow the five steps below.
  1. Find gate.bat and open it in your favorite text editor. The likely location for the gate.bat file is  C:\Program Files\gate\bin. The path could also be like this: C:\Program Files\GATE-2.0\bin .
  2. Go to the last line of the file. It should look like this:

    start "Gate" "%JAVA%" -Xmx200m -Djava.ext.dirs="%EXTDIR%" -classpath %CLASSPATH% gate.Main %FLAGS% %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9

  3. Add: -d http://www.cs.pitt.edu/mpqa/opinion-annotations/gate-annotation after gate.Main and before %FLAGS%. The resulting line should look like this:

    start "Gate" "%JAVA%" -Xmx200m -Djava.ext.dirs="%EXTDIR%" -classpath %CLASSPATH% gate.Main -d http://www.cs.pitt.edu/mpqa/opinion-annotations/gate-annotation %FLAGS% %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9

  4. Save gate.bat. If you happened to use something like Word to edit the file, make sure that you save gate.bat as TEXT ONLY!
  5. If you've run Gate before and experimented with loading xml-schemas, you may also want to delete your gate.session file.

Starting GATE:

You must be connected to the internet when you start GATE, or Gate will be unable to load the xml-schemas that specifiy the MPQA annotation types. 

However, you do not need to remain connected to the internet as you continue to work in GATE.

Windows: Double click on the gate shortcut on your desktop or find it via Start->All Programs->GATE-3.1 (or similar).

UNIX:  The hard-core way is to cd inside the GATE installation directory and  then  type "bin/ant run". You may be able to do this more easily, say with a desktop icon, depending on the linux version and your knowledge of linux.