This thesis defines the boundaries of Software Architecture for Language Engineering (SALE), an area formed by the intersection of human language computation and software engineering. SALE covers all areas of the provision of infrastructural systems to support research and development of language processing software. In order to demonstrate the theory developed in relation to SALE, we present the design, implementation and evaluation of GATE, a General Architecture for Text Engineering, which

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... lustrates in practice many of the theoretical points made. The thesis represents the first discussion of software infrastructure for language computation that covers a large portion of the field. GATE is one of the most widely used such systems in existence, and very few other systems of similar design are freely available or in common use outside of their originating institutions.