Open Source Multilingual Text Proofing with LanguageTool 2.0

Version 2.0 of LanguageTool, an Open Source style and grammar checker, has been released. It supports more than 20 languages, including English, German, Polish, French, and Spanish. The new version fixes some bugs and improves the error detection rules for several of the supported languages.

LanguageTool can be downloaded for free here.

LT-Innovate News – LT Winners (and some Losers) in 2012

We have delivered over 1,800 news stories for you in the last 12 months. Everyone will have their own best-of list. Here’s a selection of our innovation highlights:

• Event of the Year The first automatic simultaneous subtitle translation of a public lecture from German to English in Karlsruhe. Together with the news that Brussels Airport police use Skype for interpreter services. Online interpretation, unified communications, e-learning, BYOD, and digital value-add.
• Old Idea, New Format. The wunderkind Summly news summariser app finally launched in Silicon Valley  to much acclaim. Even though Connexor’s Summarizer App is already available. And French newcomer, the low-profile Mining Essentials launched its own one-click multilingual summarizer earlier in the year.
• Translation Innovation. TAUS released its translation services API to simplify access to translation data . SDL opened a new European R&D centre. And Lingo24 announced a new MT development centre. 
• Speech Technology Echoh, the UK speech recognition and related services supplier, probably had the best year with a number of major new contracts  CereProc was disruptive, while Acapela  and IVONA  competed strongly. Novauris started the year well, but then went quiet.
• Diversification prize of the year goes to SDL for its new data and sentiment analysis business especially during the US elections and for its social media listening services for SMEs.
• Virtual Assistants. European companies dominated Gartner’s list of top IVA suppliers, with Inbenta, Ikanos, Indisys, Artificial Solutions, CreativeVirtual, Argus Labs, Synthetix, Sparkling Apps and Evi.
• Among the M&As, Lingway was snapped up by Eptica, WoltersKluwer Health acquired Health Language,  semafora took over the defunct Ontoprise’s semantic products, Kwaga acquired Boxcar, Royal Philips Electronics sold its speech processing business to an Austrian private equity fund, and Pearson and Bertelsmann joined forces in digital content publishing Policy agendas. 
• The UK planned to modify copyright law for non-commercial data mining .META-NET released its cri de coeur about digital language extinction in Europe Brand new LT Start-ups included Capito Systems (speech), Reverbeo (translation), and Syllabs (automatic content generation).
• Prize-winners Q-Sensei and Acrolinx won awards for their products or were given best-in-class industry status. Across Language’s Server won an SME innovation prize, and SwiftKey (from TouchType) a Global Mobile Award. Estonia starred as Europe’s top start-up nation.
• Semantic search engines on hold? South African Gatfol semantic search engine launch never happened  nor did the UK Sehrch  But Volunia  is still up and running.

Happy New Year for 2013 with LT-Innovate!

LT Innovate Weekly – Joining the News Dots – 9 to 14 December 2012

Here’s a customer view of the week’s LT news. Which European sectors were explicitly or implicitly addressed by announcements? You might be surprised!

Lawyers and jurists: Good Law is an ideas movement in the UK that aims to build better readability (including ‘plain’ language), accessibility, and discovery into legal documentation of all kinds. Lots of LT challenges in this text-intensive industry.

Industry-specific documentation managers. The Dutch-funded TEXsis  project has been looking at how to factor domain-specific terminology into the whole document translation process, from authoring through machine translation to editing and reading. In-domain terms are obviously key to customised understanding.

Biomed researchers and their kin: Linguamatics will be playing a key role in MANTRA, another project focused on multilingual terminologies to help mine knowledge simultaneously across multiple language repositories. Faster, more accurate knowledge discovery is a competitive asset in this sector.

Healthcare workers, researchers and patients: LTC has successively completed MORMED, a project that has built a platform for dedicated knowledge-sharing in the healthcare field around specific diseases. Seamless multilingual access to knowledge helps broaden and deepen the collaborative reach of everyone involved.

Business content searchers: TEMIS is to equip Bloomberg BNA’s vast repository of documentary knowledge used by business, legal and research experts. These people need to find the right stuff as quickly and accurately as possible, and also benefit from the “similarity” between content objects to deepen their understanding.

The literally speechless: The UK Creative Speech Technology Network  has released a film showing how various cases of speech production disorders can be aided by speech synthesis technology, including a TV comedian!

Hands-free experts who need to stay connected: Ikanos Consulting has added Ziggy, a speech-driven virtual assistant, to its wireless headset computer. People using these ruggedized headsets can keep in contact and search for information while working with both hands under difficult conditions. Safety, optimised information usage, and a better UX.

And the Key Ingredient for a Successful Customer Experience Management is…

A recent Cisco survey  underlines the fact that the customer experience is of paramount importance online, and not just price. Overall 40% of respondents said they would be willing to spend more with a company if they improved the overall customer experience, In Western Europe the figure is 81% and 90% in the UK. But as is so often the case in these surveys, there is one monster missing factor: language equity.

Interestingly, a good third of the respondents (35%) want businesses to ensure they can easily ask questions and access information before making a purchase. This sort of behaviour is as old as the hills in the world’s traditional bricks & mortar shops and marketplaces, and is so natural a practice as to almost go unnoticed. But online this sort of exchange is complex to manage, though it can bring enormous added value to the retailer due to the rich usable data embedded in the query process.

Online, the natural first step is to trawl through the retail website, or check out the usually limited information available on product FAQs The next would be to talk (live) with the ecommerce site in question - or chat (live with a keyboard) if you sitting in a crowded train. The emerging platforms for live video chat using a  tablets will soon replace these. Or you always fall back on email. Another fast-trending way to get information indirectly is to consult or mine your social network and its long comment tails, though you’re more likely to get opinion than the full facts.

The eventual transaction will be sealed with an exchange of virtual money executed by a single click on an electronic button. But the prior information-gathering processing will depend entirely on the monster missing factor every centimetre of the way: a customer using their language to reach a goal.

Almost every exercise in customer experience management using today’s communications tools will need to put language management high on its list of must-haves. Way ahead of all the other bells and whistles that will win customer confidence, build loyalty and accelerate ‘conversion’. It’s all so obvious…yet so often forgotten.

Negotiating in a marketplace, a smart merchant will usually adapt their language to yours. Online, that means an end-to-end (not just a landing page) experience in a customer’s language – text, voice, videos - the lot. For the LT industry the issue is clear: it is not about how to introduce translation tech everywhere to see if its work in situ. It means starting from deep knowledge about the customer experience and inventing transparent language solutions that perform the right job, whatever you decide to call them.

Bloomberg BNA Selects TEMIS for Content Categorization and Enrichment

Leading Legal Publisher Applying Powerful Luxid® Content Enrichment Solution to Vast Archive.

New York, NY– December 11, 2012 – TEMIS announced that it has signed a multi-year license and services agreement with Bloomberg BNA for use of the flagship TEMIS software solution, Luxid® Content Enrichment, to provide a key capability in the management of its multimillion-document database. Bloomberg BNA is a wholly owned subsidiary of Bloomberg and a leading source of legal, regulatory, and business information for professionals.

Bloomberg BNA has chosen to deploy the Luxid® semantic tagging and linking platform as a powerful method for categorizing news articles and other content, consistently indexing unstructured data against a comprehensive legal taxonomy.

“We are honoured that our flagship Luxid® Content Enrichment platform has been selected by an industry leader as highly regarded as Bloomberg BNA”, said Guillaume Mazieres, EVP North American Operations of TEMIS. “TEMIS will help Bloomberg BNA deliver accurate, targeted and always relevant information to its demanding professional customers, offering an unparalleled user experience.”

“Bloomberg BNA strongly believes that powerful content enrichment technology such as Luxid® from TEMIS will enhance subscribers' interactions with our content, improving the efficiency of search as well as opening up interesting possibilities for connections based on document similarity”, said Audrey Hipkins, Chief Product Officer at Bloomberg BNA.

About TEMIS

TEMIS helps organizations structure, manage and leverage their unstructured information assets. Its flagship platform, Luxid®, identifies and extracts targeted information to semantically enrich content with domain-specific metadata. Luxid® enables professional publishers to efficiently package and deliver relevant information to their audience, and helps enterprises to intelligently archive, manage, analyze, discover and share increasing volumes of information.

Founded in 2000, TEMIS operates in the United States, Canada, UK, France and Germany, and is represented worldwide through its network of certified partners.

TEMIS’ innovative solutions have attracted the business of leading organizations such as AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), Agence France-Presse, BASF, Bayer Schering Pharma, BNA (Bureau of National Affairs), BNP Paribas, CARMA International, Editions Lefebvre-Sarrut, Elsevier, EMC, Europol, French Ministry of Defence, French Ministry of Finance, Gannett, Karger, Invest in France Agency, Merck Serono, Nature Publishing Group, Novartis, Philip Morris International, PSA Peugeot-Citroen, Sanofi-aventis, Simon & Schuster, Springer Science+Business Media, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Thieme, Thomson Reuters, Trinity Mirror plc and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

http://www.temis.com

http://tagline.temis.com

Author: Martine Falhon

Corporate Communications

martine.falhon[a]temis.com

Tel.: +33 (0)4 56 38 24 03

LTInnovate’s Weekly – Joining the News Dots – 1-7 December

Simplifying the Content Workflow

ABBYY’s new Mobile OCR app will help you digitise content in situ, with Acrolinx’ new 3.0 release you can SEO your content to make it optimally searchable , and Summly will summarise it all into 350 words for small form devices once it’s published.

Niche Applications

As always, it is the business case that matters most. Inbenta can help you manage email content for CRM units, while Elsevier is providing Meditech’s electronic health records with its ExitCare patient-centric content in English and Spanish. And if you haven’t yet realized that linguistic analysis (not just stats) is a must-have for effective text analysis of any content under the sun, then read Bitext’s white paper on the topic.

Making Multilingual Work

Premier MT supplier SYSTRAN has brought out SYSTRANLinks to simplify website localization . And to help you make MT quality evaluation less of a headache, TAUS has launched its Dynamic Quality Framework toolset to centralise and share best practices on this thorny subject. Two possible candidates are the European and Chinese Patent offices, who have just launched a joint English-Chinese MT system for IPO documents using well-known technology. Is bilingual the same as multilingual?

The Business Value of Audio Recordings

Technology can now help harness vast volumes of spoken content – accented, emotive, personal, in-your-face, revealing language data. This speaks volumes to different constituencies, including VOC analysts, security forces, healthcare personnel, educationalists, speech technologists, and more. Three examples this week: Wolters Kluwer and FX are to make audio recordings of healthcare sector meetings available; Natterbox now integrates with NICE systems to deliver centralized fixed/mobile audio recording for customer analytics and BI. And TextMaster has launched a first-of-its kind mobile app to transcribe/translate spoken recordings.

SYSTRAN Launches SYSTRANLinks Simplifies website localization

SYSTRAN, today announced, during the Web 2012 Paris, the release of SYSTRANLinks, an online service which makes website translation faster, easier and more cost-effective than current solutions. SYSTRANLinks is now live and available for use by small to large businesses, eCommerce sites, language service providers, Web agencies, and innovative individuals wanting to extend their global reach, by subscribing to one of four service levels: Free, Standard, Pro, and Enterprise. For more information or to test drive this exciting new service visit www.systranlinks.com.

Companies recognize the value of being able to talk to multinational audiences in their own languages. The challenge is to create geo-friendly Web content that can penetrate new markets, surpass customer expectations and enhance the value of the brand it represents.

However, rolling-out website translations can be an extremely difficult and expensive effort, involving a complex maze of diverse technologies and costly suppliers.

SYSTRANLinks empowers companies with a rich range of tools which expedite the website localization workflow and optimize quality in a cost-effective manner. Businesses can launch and manage website localization projects via SYSTRANLinks’ innovative and reliable collaborative online platform. In just a few clicks, SYSTRANLinks reproduces, pre-translates and hosts new websites. The user-friendly tools allow editors to continually enhance content, shortening the time to break language barriers so businesses can penetrate new global markets and develop opportunities.

More information at: www.systranLinks.com - www.systransoft.com

The full press release is available for download here.

Grasshopper reduces the number of incoming e-mails by using Inbenta on their customer support portal

Inbenta, a provider of Natural Language Processing technologies and Semantic Search, member of the LT-Innovate Network, announces that Grasshopper was able to reduce the number of oncoming e-mails by using Inbenta Semantic Search on their Customer Support portal. Grasshopper customers are now able to find more of the answers they’re looking for without submitting a ticket to their support team.

Inbenta’s “Instant Email” functionality, available as a Zendesk Integration, dynamically retrieves relevant articles and FAQs while the users type their e-mails, without disturbing or altering their user experience. As users are provided with relevant information as they type an e-mail, they don’t have to send their email and wait for a response.

As Allison Canty, Social Media and Community Manager at Grasshopper, says:

"We saw results almost immediately after implementing Inbenta on our Zendesk powered support site. In the first two months alone, the percentage of unanswered questions went down, from 21.83% to 8.29% and our click-through ratio increased by 34.4%."

"In the first week after implementing Inbenta’s dynamic FAQs on our “submit a request” page, we measured a 22.91% deflection rate for Emails/Tickets,"

"With Inbenta’s help, we were able to identify topics we were lacking in content and create it, based on Inbenta’s suggestions, which helped us greatly improve our online Customer Service. Our customers are now getting more relevant answers to their questions, faster and without submitting a support ticket. It’s a win-win for everyone!"

More information about the full press release

Language Technologies: Establishing Europe's Global Market Position & Securing the Digital Single Market

On 6 December 2012, top executives of European Language Technology companies, who have joined forces in LT-Innovate, launched a Discussion Document calling for a major effort to deploy language technologies as a key building block of the Digital Single Market and enabler of a language-neutral eContent economy. 

The Discussion Document underlines that “mastering human language is the next big opportunity in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and Language Technology (LT) is a key technology of the future. Europe (a multilingual continent with more than 63 languages) should step up its investment in LT as strategic key enabling technologies that will determine the continent's economic competitiveness as well as its cultural integrity".

In one its main proposals, the Document calls for a “European Language Cloud” (ELC) which would considerably bring down the costs of cross-border products and services and allow all Europeans to seamlessly interact with the 1 billion+ market of speakers of European languages. The ELC would constitute a major opportunity and boost for the European economy and society, creating many new jobs. Such a platform should also support the languages of Europe’s major trading partners, making European companies and citizens fittest for the global markets.

Jochen Hummel, LT-Innovate Chairman, comments: “There is no lack of innovation in Europe. The main stumbling block is that Europe’s SMEs do not grow beyond their national or regional linguistic islands to address European and global markets. European SMEs must get access to a market of continent-wide dimensions, through European-scale projects backed by European-scale funding. The European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Programme offers a major opportunity to boost innovation and regain competitiveness; but European Programmes need to become results-driven and should put innovators and job creators, in other words SMEs, into the driving seat!”.

Download the Discussion Document here... and comment on it below!

MORMED: a new platform for seamless, interactive, and multilingual collaboration in healthcare and life sciences

LTC is proud to announce the availability of a new social networking community platform in the medical domain. It features near real-time communication in multiple languages for wikis, blogs, forums, polls etc., together with semantic analysis, and a content recommender.

LTC successfully completed the final review of the MORMED project - Multilingual Organic Information Management in the Medical Domain - on 28th November, 2012. Fifty per cent funded by the European Commission, MORMED enables instant global knowledge sharing and interactive communication across language barriers. Its fast, automated and secure translation solution continuously improves by learning from human quality feedback. The system also provides enhanced content analysis for users by suggesting suitable tags for content creation and recommending relevant information.

Key features include an innovative translation workflow back-end and intelligent, language-neutral information processing capabilities. All functionality is available through a dynamic user interface. Users can easily understand the information exchanged within community groups regardless of the language used.

The benefits of this platform have been clearly demonstrated for the user communities of two conditions: Lupus and Antiphospholipid Syndrome. This was clearly brought out in comments from the reviewers, one of whom said that the “partners invested a lot of time and energy to make this project successful, and we commend the continuation of LTC’s substantial efforts in creating a superior product. We wish LTC and its partners every success in marketing MORMED to potential customers in the medical domain and beyond.”

Susan Fraser, EU Project Officer, added that “it is a satisfaction to see that an EU-funded project has produced results that are clearly beneficial to the end-users, as testified by the moderator of the live MORMED platform Angie Davidson, Campaign Director of the St. Thomas’ Lupus Trust, during the review meeting.”

LTC will now make the highly innovative MORMED solution available to enable specialised communities to dynamically share information and collaborate interactively in overcoming language barriers across a range of usage scenarios.

About LTC

LTC provides cutting edge and validated language technology and services that accelerate time to market, create new global revenue opportunities, expand worldwide brands and drastically reduce operational costs. LTC offers seasoned expertise in all aspects of authoring, managing and delivering corporate content in multiple languages including workflow, and all aspects of multilingual technology.

More information about LTC/Mormed, please contact: 

Bradley Harrad
Tel: +44 (0) 2085492359
Email: bradley.harrad@ltcinnovates.com 

Website: http://www.ltcinnovates.com / http://www.mormed.eu

Lingle Online Appoints a Learning Industry Professional to the Board

LingleOnline Ltd. has announced the appointment of Eric Baber, IATEFL President and member of the European Learning Industry Group executive committee, to the Board of Directors. CEO Ian Butler described him as “a highly experienced educator and distinguised advocate of technology in language learning”. He further added “Eric brings a wealth of knowledge in teaching with technology together with an in--‐depth strategic understanding of educators’ needs” to Lingle.

LT Innovate’s Weekly - Joining the News Dots – 24 Nov- 1 Dec

Translation: Speedy, Crowdsourced and Absolutely Vital

While Finnish-firm Multilizer released version 3 of its translation management solution and the Jordan newbie Dakwak launched a powerful new localisation platform presence for MENA regional start-ups , the rest of the industry seemed be focusing on the still uncertain virtues of crowdsourcing. Lionbridge acquired crowdsourcer Virtual Solutions while Adobe launched its own translation crowdsourcing community site  to explore best practices. Sign of the times, the EPO co-launched an English-Chinese engine with China’s patent organisation.

Virtual Assistants: Personal, Smart and Coming to a Screen Near You

The buzz around IVAs (intelligent Virtual Assistants) is growing. Intel Capital has taken a stake in Spanish IVA maker Indisys . Could this be related to Intel the company’s effort to prepare interface developers for its new perceptual computing kit? In another move, the French IVA firm Akio, has snapped up Dialonics, a dialog solutions compatriot All this probably explains why voice specialist research house Opus has published one of the first reports of its kind on ‘personal virtual assistants’.

Semantics & Content – a Natural Partnership

In the UK, Concept Searching signed semantic information management partnerships with mining specialist RKO in Western Canada, and IT services firm Black Blade while Brand Embassy acquired start-up Beepl semantic search supplier. TEMIS will now deliver its semantic enrichment technology to global publisher Datamatics, which is especially focused on the eBook marketplace. Deeper down in the infrastructure, Norwegian developer Webnodes AS released a Semantic Integration Server to bring more semantics into database technology 

Member States of Language

Sweden pushes its model for multilingualism , Wales is proud to open a Clinithink global &D centre , and Ireland is building a cloud computing research centre.

Exploit of the Week

The CreST creative speech tech network is driving a road-show around Northern England to boost awareness of …yes, speech technology!