This tutorial by Diana Maynard demonstrates the basics of text analysis tasks such as named entity recognition and sentiment analysis with the open source GATE tools. Participants use the toolkit to try simple tasks as we go along, such as using some of the existing applications and tools for different languages, and try annotating their own texts. There are dozens of different tools and plugins to try out. Adventurous users can even try building their own simple applications, tinkering with existing ones, or comparing different tools for the same task and evaluating and visualising the results. Demonstration and discussion of the successes and failures will be encouraged!