29 May 2012

The LTi News Roundup - 27th May 2012 (part 1)


Weekly news round-up prepared by the Editorial Staff of LangTechNews for LT-Innovate, the Forum for Europe’s Language Technology Industry.

What's happening in the Language Technology industry, from LT-Innovate

Top of the Week: 

SDL is to set up an R&D unit to be headed by machine-intelligence academic Bill Byrne in Cambridge (UK). This represents a significant engagement with innovation in Europe’s largest translation/localisation company, and points to a highly positive dynamic in the LT industry. As well as being an acquisitive Translation Technology supplier (Trados, Language Weaver), SDL also has ambitions that sound familiar: organizing the (enterprise) world’s information. It has made acquisitions in content management systems that help customers leverage information assets such legacy data. By stepping up an industrial R&D agenda that will cover not just translation today but possibly speech data processing tomorrow (Byrne is a Machine Intelligence expert with a track record in both fields), SDL is poised to generate synergies of service across multiple data management tasks. Industry research like this is a rare luxury in the LT space. So it was also good news that TAUS ─ another key player to develop a research track that drives innovation in the translation industry ─ announced that cloud-translation automation pioneer Achim Ruopp has joined TAUSLabs as Product Development Manager. 

Company of the Week: Connexor.

It was nice to see one of Finland’s most experienced LT companies deliver a double whammy this week – one in the elusive market for summarisation, a technology we have long noted as offering more promise than product. Connexor has traditionally been an enterprise LT technology supplier with a prestigious client list and excellent credentials in large-scale, multilingual NLP applications. With this summarizer app it is now surfing the free mobile wave by adapting its existing technology to consumer information management. For the professional market, it also launched a free browser-based sentiment analysis app that identifies positive/negative opinion in the tsunami of social media data. 

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