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I've started to write a simple sentiment analysis tool.

Currently I am looking at GATE and RapidMiner but being a beginner not able to concentrate on both.

Could someone please tell me which one will be better in terms of usage, learning curve, licensing etc?

user229044
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siva
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3 Answers3

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I vote for RapidMiner for three reasons, and I have used them both:

  1. RapidMiner's GUI interface makes things much smoother - it has been well-designed.
  2. You can use plug-ins in RapidMiner that have a ton of back-end power, like R and Weka - these make the system far more versatile than GATE for statistics and data mining work.
  3. RapidMiner has a pretty good support network. I definitely recommend looking at the Vancouver Data link above, because the things that Neil does with text completely blew my mind - so I went and used his methods. They worked like a charm!
  4. RapidMiner can be deployed as a server, which means that you can really crunch the numbers and data when you need to. There isn't a desktop-only limitation.

That said, here are a few things about GATE:

  1. GATE probably has a better Semantic understanding of text, and the built-in vocabularies are pretty extensive.
  2. The GATE system is mature and well-developed, and is continuing to be developed.
  3. GATE can handle Arabic and a few other languages that are likely to give RapidMiner an issue. As a matter of fact, for straight Corpus work, GATE is darn impressive. It has a lot of plug-ins as well, but installing them isn't just plug-and-play, like with RapidMiner.

RapidMiner is supposed to be releasing version 5.2 around late January 2012 (right now), so if you decide to go that route, you will have the option of the well-supported 5.1, or the beta-version of 5.2.

William M-B
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Not to toot my own horn, but I did a five part video series on text analytics with RapidMiner here:

http://vancouverdata.blogspot.com/2010/11/text-analytics-with-rapidminer-loading.html

GATE is an incomprehensible mess

Neil McGuigan
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both, GATE and RapidMiner are powerful text mining and sentiment analysis tools. I personally prefer RapidMiner, because I found it easier to learn and the RapidMiner training courses provided by Rapid-I gave me a really quick start. They offer a dedicated course on text mining and sentiment analysis: Sentiment Analysis, Opinion Mining, and Automated Market Research .

Starting in September or October 2009, they will also offer webinars. You should contact them directly, if you would like to learn more about their webinars. Several major online market research companies in Europe and the US are using RapidMiner for opinion mining and sentiment analysis from internet discussions groups and web blogs. For more details and references I would again suggest to simply ask their team at contact(at)rapid-i.com or check their RapidMiner forum.