comparison of natural language processing tools (UIMA, LingPipe, Lucene, Gate, Stanford)

Question

I want to choose a natural language processing tool to do common tasks such as tokenization, sentence detection,various tagging (Name Entity Recognition, POS tagging, ... ). my question has two parts:

1. What are the criteria for choosing a natural language processing tool?
2. Among (UIMA, LingPipe, Lucene, Gate, Stanford), which one satisfy these criteria better?

and what is your suggestion ?

Answer 1

Some general Criteria:

1. how many tasks can I perform with the provided models (e.g. does the tool contains models for my tasks like spanish tokenisation or protein NER)?
2. how easy is it for me to add the missing tools.

BTW, I would add NLTK to your list, and its excellent, free accompanying book.