taraXŰ: The first end-to-end machine translation environment project status as of October 2012

The rising demand for machine translation (MT) and the resulting implementations have shown that workflows and system architectures can become very complex. Particularly, the setup of combination or hybrid systems making use of different MT engines running in parallel has kept many language service providers from introducing MT technology.

To address this issue, euroscript teamed up in 2010 with a strong project consortium in the highly ambitious R&D project taraXŰ. The project has by now resulted in the first advanced machine translation environment that deploys amongst other things:

• Corpus and translation management (running different rule or template based and statistical machine translation engines in parallel)
• Automated source- and target-language quality assessment
• Automatic selection of the best translation through innovative methods
• A web-interface allowing human translators to correct machine translation output and assess its quality by ranking, post-editing, error-analysis, etc.

"The taraXŰ project gives us an unprecedented opportunity to perform applied research in a human-centric setting. The early inclusion of human translators in the development process is definitely a winning strategy to further improve machine translation quality" says Hans Uszkoreit, Scientific Director at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and Head of DFKI Language Technology Lab.

The taraXŰ project consortium relies upon expertise in translation services, machine translation and evaluation, language checking, language technology, and related fields. Project partners are Acrolinx (member of the LT-Innovate Network), the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), euroscript Deutschland and yocoy (member of the LT-Innovate Network and winner of LT-Innovate Award 2012).

Press Release on euroscript

The BBC: from Auntie to Lady Semantica

The BBC is affectionately known in the UK as “Auntie”, probably for its gentle and slightly old-fashioned didactic style. But deep in its IT ecosystem, the huge broadcaster is a hot bed of innovation. Not for nothing is it ranked only second to Google as the “favorite place to work” for LinkedIn techie job seekers.

For anyone interested in how a major content publisher is embracing the challenge of language technologies, check out this long interview with BBC ‘semantic web’ people. After full-scale coverage of the World Football Cup last year and the London Olympics in 2012, the content team have been exploring all the implications of delivering tailored archival content for a cutting-edge online user experience. Or what LT-Innovate is calling “intelligent content”. 

Below is a summary of what they’re thinking about today:

“We are currently exploring various other uses of Semantic Web technologies within BBC R&D. In particular we’re looking at ways in which Linked Data can be used to help search and discovery of archive content. We have been working on automatically identifying the topics and the contributors for BBC programmes from their content, using a combination of Linked Data, signal processing, speech-to-text and Named Entity Recognition technologies, which we have been talking about in various places, such as the Linked Data on the Web workshop and at WWW’2012. The automatically generated links from programmes to entities described in the Linked Data cloud might be incorrect in places, so we are also exploring how users can validate or correct those links, and how this feedback can be taken into account within our automated interlinking workflow. We are planning to write in more details about our experiments in that space on the our blog in the next couple of weeks.”

Check out their blog to keep abreast of Auntie’s rapid reinvention as Lady Semantica. 

Author: Andrew Joscelyne

The LTi News Roundup - 5th November 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.

LT-Innovate: October European News Round-up

Introducing a new LT-Innovate service - a monthly update up of must-have news about events impacting the European LT industry from our dedicated site.

October traditionally marks the start of Q4 for businesses, a massive global conference season, product launches (in the consumer run-up to Christmas), and much strategizing and predicting about the coming year. Which means plenty of news flowing around the LT sector.

Big Content Publishing

Pearson and Bertelsmann have agreed to merge Penguin and Random House book publishers to build the world's largest consumer (popular and educational) publishing house with an eye on the still-emerging e-book or e-reader market. For the LT sector, a global player will mean large language resources for testing and expanding language technologies. E-books will draw on voice synthesis, and literary and educational content will need translating quickly when best-sellers hit the global markets. Digital convergence of text, video, and sound technologies should also drive development in innovative new 'cultural' products. 

Meanwhile technical publishers are further honing the usability of their wares. Elsevier has announced that chapters will now be a natural unit of online information for the technical publishing market, and will add chapter-specific metadata to help users search for the precise content they need. And Wolters Kluwer has acquired the company Health Language to boost the searchability of its point-of-care content by incorporating high quality medical terminology into its search technology. 

Film buffs and subtitle technology suppliers should note that the British Film Institute is planning to digitise 10,000 films over the next five years, possibly providing a vast store of spoken language data and a very long tail of speech translation opportunities.

A handy content generation aid (aka authoring) comes from the Norwegian firm iFinger which offers word/term search on or offline from leading content providers (Collins, Ernst Klett Verlag and Cappelen Forlag).and Wikipedia in all languages.

The LTi News Roundup - 5th November 2012 (part 2)

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


Making Translation Simpler

Lots of conferences and networking in the translation industry this month with the TAUS User Conference, tcworld and LocWorld events among others. One small trend: the emergence of what might be called “translation analytics” – i.e. business intelligence about the people and processes involved in translation. The Luxembourg provider Wordbee released a new business analytics module for their Enterprise Translation Management System, and discussions among TAUS service vendors focussed partly on the need for more data on the translation process so as to optimise anything from technology to translator selection. This is only natural as analytics of all kinds become part of the Zeitgeist.
When it comes to operations, the trend is to simplify workflows to reduce process time in the production chain. TranslateKarate for example delivered a super-simple online workflow, TAUS has launched a stripped-down API to streamline translation content exchange after inheriting the mantle of standards watchdog earlier last year. Meanwhile the Irish start-up KantanMT launched a BetaIV version of its cloud engine as part of its continuous development agenda, in a bid to attract more customers before the paying service kicks in. And Kilgray received a Deloitte Award as one of the leading young tech companies in Hungary, rewarding its insistence on building a user ecosystem bottom-up together with its customers.

Language Learning

In a global language learning market worth $58.2B in 2011 (including individual and enterprise services), it is surprising how little serious innovation news swims into our focus. So it was good to hear that Irish start-up RendezVu received an EC seal of approval for its ExamSpeak application to help learners prepare for exams. 
In another move, the online language learning busuu with over 25M users in 200 countries has won another round of funding and is moving to London to stay closer to their VC partners and HarperCollins publisher – and perhaps benefit from the positive tech-biz vibrations in the UK. 
AABBY has meanwhile released a set of Lingvo Dictionaries for iOS which offer learning friendly information and pronunciation aids for smart phone users.
In a big data world, it’s also worth noting that the Swiss firm Education First has published its latest report that rates countries on their proficiency in speaking English. Although it is obvious why English is the language of choice for this exercise, it would be interesting to have data about proficiency in other languages. And to fine-tune the analysis below the level of countries (too many are almost neck and neck) to other useful demographics.

The LTi News Roundup - 5th November 2012 (part 3)

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

Text Analytics 

In the busy world of sentiment detection and text analytics, there seems to be a growing need to treat languages in the plural. Witness the choice of the Spanish company Bitext to join the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Insights Ecosystem. This will offer it access to more customers and enable it to promote its Spanish language analytics solutions more globally. Interestingly, this ecosystem has attracted the US firm LinguaSys which also specializes in multilingual analytics and strongly believes that you cannot do proper text analytics via translation. European social media analysis specialists would seem to be well-placed to provide the added value of local language insight.

Pressure on Unified Communications?

A report from the UK found that open standards are needed in the videoconferencing market to simplify the complex puzzle of video hardware and services. Videoconferencing in a time of shrinking travel budgets looks like a no brainer, and the arrival of new interfaces – tablets and smartphones – is putting pressure on suppliers to democratise this still-expensive meeting facility. At the same time VoIP companies like Skype with its Windows 8 integration and the German company FriendCaller are offering user-friendly alternatives to full-blown telepresence. In due course they will benefit from recording, summarisation and speech search and translation technologies that can help transform calls and online meetings into actionable rich content resources. Especially where risk, compliance and confidentiality play a key role

Transenter joins LT-Innovate

Transenter was founded in 2002 as a traditional translation language service provider and has since expanded to become an innovative leader in the translation market. The company has translated millions of words and supported hundreds of firms in achieving their growth. They know how to keep pace with the huge content flow of international companies. Transenter has found the way to translate your content immediately into 20 or 30 different languages, effortlessly and instantly and brings innovative solutions to the multilingual content market, solutions that play a part in increasing your company’s revenue by providing you with access to cutting edge translation technology, thereby reducing turnaround time while maintaining a high-quality translation.

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Quorate Technology joins LT-Innovate

Quorate Technology is a spin-out from the Centre for Speech Technology Research at The University of Edinburgh. Its proprietary speech recognition software addresses the challenge of being able to find keywords in audio and video recordings. Unlike other speech recognition products, the system is targeted at conversational speech. Any type of meeting with up to 12 participants can be captured using standard recording equipment, transcribed automatically using Quorate’s novel software, and archived for subsequent review. Quorate provides an intuitive browser interface in order to quickly and efficiently review recorded meetings for desired search terms.

Meetings can be captured using a panoramic video camera and any documents presented can be time-stamped, linked to the audio recording and located when a search is performed. Quorate is based in Edinburgh and staffed by a team of some of the world’s leading speech recognition and language processing experts. There are numerous potential use-cases for audio search and automatic transcription of multi-participant meetings.

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iFinger joins LT-Innovate

iFinger is a digital dictionary search engine that automatically appears on the window you’re working with, no matter whether you’re on or offline. The company offers instant access to quality reference content by world leading providers, enabling you to increase the accuracy and efficacy of your written work. You can choose to download from a wide variety of reference content by respected publishers such as Collins, Ernst Klett Verlag and Cappelen Forlag. iFinger also offers direct search in Wikipedia, whose functionality is available in all languages.

iFinger has more than 2.5 million individual users and also offers global multi language solutions for corporate networks. The company is registered in the United Kingdom. Operational activities are carried out by iFinger Ltd (NUF) Norway.
The iFinger software offers a user friendly way to search high quality reference material produced by well known publishers. The open architecture of the iFinger software is able to facilitate multi language content from any publishing house. At present, our product range consists of over 100 respected titles with more due to be added in the near future. We also have the ability to offer additional titles “à la carte”

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Synthema joins LT-Innovate

SyNTHEMA, a leader in Human Language Technology, has been developing Language and Semantic Intelligence, Machine Translation, Data Mining, Text Mining and Speech Solutions since 1994.

With a long-standing presence in the globalization market, SyNTHEMA boasts a great experience as a translation and localization service provider in a wide range of business sectors: from Information Technology to Finance, from Marketing to e-Learning.

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Lingenio joins LT-Innovate

Lingenio GmbH is the producer of the machine translation system translate and the innovative software suite office wörterbuch. Since its setup in 1999, Lingenio has gained a wealth of research and development knowhow that has been moulding the evolution of machine translation technologies.

Its objective is to advance research and the transfer of knowledge for sustainable progress in the efficiency and efficacy of automatic translation.

Lingenio technologies not only enhance the quality of translation, they also afford an essential contribution to cost and time savings. The innovative technologies developed by Lingenio have been recognised by a long line of renowned national and international awards. Lingenio safeguards the pioneering status of its technology by collaborating with a great many national and international universities and companies, including Spoken Translation, Inc. (USA) and Synthema SRL (Italy). In addition, Lingenio is involved in a number of research projects and is a prolific publisher of its own articles on the improvement and optimisation of machine translation infrastructure.

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CrossLang joins LT-Innovate

CrossLang is a privately owned consulting and systems integration company dedicated to translation automation technology. Today, CrossLang is a leader in independent translation automation solutions and works for a growing number of global companies.

It brings together a team of professionals with expertise in process engineering, computational linguistics, knowledge management, business automation and all aspects of the language market.

More and more companies are discovering that the dynamics of web content cannot be handled by the traditional translation model. By the time the translation has completed the human cycle the content is often outdated – making the whole process redundant. In this case, machine translation could be the right solution – fast, efficient and accurate if deployed correctly.

The CrossLang specialists can help you assess the feasibility of using machine translation and guide you through the vital first steps in planning for enterprise-wide implementation.

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Logrus joins LT-Innovate

For years Logrus have been developing systems and tools to support translation projects, covering tasks ranging from technical and linguistic quality checks to project management solutions that can be seamlessly integrated into the enterprise resource planning system:

• Website content management system: a simple and intuitive system for creating and updating website content, including that of multilingual websites.
• Bug tracking system: the system lets project participants publish any detected errors in real time and keep track of the relevant changes in the database.
• Translation team management: acting as the hub of information exchange among translators, editors, and consultants, it raises the awareness of all process participants about potential complications and ways to resolve them, speeds the translation process along, and enhances the quality of translated material.
• Project Management: Logrus Dashboard enables customers to keep track of the current status of projects and their components. Automatically updated charts offer an instant snapshot of the situation and help save time on data analysis.

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playence joins LT-Innovate

playence is a provider of semantic annotation and search products for multimedia content. Its mission is to help organizations worldwide reduce the costs associated with annotating, locating and discovering their multimedia assets, ensuring availability and access across the organization.
Its software provides novel and innovative solutions to its clients. A recent technology forecast by Pricewaterhouse Coopers provides an overview of technologies playence is working with.

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Vocapia joins LT-Innovate

Vocapia Research develops speech processing technologies for multilingual, large vocabulary speech recognition (speech-to-text), automatic audio segmentation, language identification and speaker recognition. 

The Vocapia Research VoxSigma software suite delivers state of the art performance for broadcast data and conversational speech in multiple languages.

This core technology can serve as the basis for a variety of applications ranging from interactive conversational systems to the automatic indexing of audio data.

For the latter class of applications, large vocabulary continuous speech recognition is the key technology for enabling content-based information access in audio and video documents. Most of the linguistic information is encoded in the audio channel of audiovisual data, which once transcribed can be accessed using text-based tools.

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Alpineon joins LT-Innovate

Alpineon Research  Development, Ltd., is a high-tech enterprise that develops hardware and software solutions, particularly in the fields of ICT for automotive industries. Development is focused on speech technologies: speech recognition, speech synthesis and speech machine translation , with numerous voice-based products, such as voice portals or SMS readers and electronic mail available. 

Proteus TTS speech synthesizer automatically converts text to natural and intelligible speech. It is intended for personal or business use. Service providers and operators can incorporate automated voice solutions for access to information. Proteus TTS speech synthesizer is a welcome tool for groups of persons with special needs, such as the blind and visually impaired, mute and the elderly; it enables them to listen to electronic text in an audio format. 

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LT-Innovate Workshop, 8-9 October 2012, Brussels

On 8-9 October 2012, LT-Innovate organizes a two-day workshop at Hotel "Le Méridien" in Brussels, Belgium. After the successful Summit in June, LT-Innovate pursues its proactive agenda aiming at strengthening and catalising the European Language Technology sector. The workshop will address four topics:

• Responding to upcoming EU calls for projects (ICT Call 10, SME Initiative on Analytics Call)
• Developing a collective vision statement towards achieving excellence in LT
• Facilitating the interaction between LT suppliers and buyers / markets through Buyer Focus Groups
• Incorporating LT-Innovate and strengthening its service capability

Please register for this event before 18 September.

More information about this event

3DS Exalead joins LT-Innovate

Founded in 2000 by search engine pioneers, 3DS Exalead is a global provider of information access software for the enterprise and the Webr of information access software for the enterprise and the Web.

In the enterprise and across the Internet, over 110 million people worldwide rely on Exalead CloudView® to intuitively search, explore, and analyze information. Why? Because Exalead CloudView is uniquely capable of gathering, aligning and enriching mountains of data – whether internal or external, structured or unstructured, simple or complex – and delivering that information in a way that makes instant sense to users in their own context, anywhere, anytime. Exalead CloudView is the unified information access platform that powers all Exalead solutions, from the company’s public WWW search engine (the world’s 4th largest) to its enterprise search deployments and its custom and vertical Search-Based Applications. The Exalead ii Solutions are workflow-specific Search-Based Applications that transform large volumes of diverse, siloed data into real-time information intelligence (“ii”), and deliver that information intelligence in context to users to improve business processes.

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NICE Joins LT-Innovate

NICE Systems, is the worldwide leader of intent-based solutions that capture and analyze interactions and transactions, realize intent, and extract and leverage insights to deliver impact in real time.

Driven by cross-channel and multi-sensor analytics, NICE solutions enable organizations to improve business performance, increase operational efficiency, prevent financial crime, ensure compliance, and enhance safety and security. NICE serves over 25,000 organizations in the enterprise and security sectors, representing a variety of sizes and industries in more than 150 countries, and including over 80 of the Fortune 100 companies. NICE has about 3100 employees and revenues in 2012 are expected to reach $930-950M. 

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Call Trunk Ltd joins LT-Innovate

Call Trunk Ltd is an independent, privately held company, headquartered in London with offices in Dallas, TX, Ft. Myers, FL and Montreal, Canada. 

Calltrunk is like email for conversation. Users can record their conversations, store them all online, search them for information and share the ones that they want to: the spoken word is no longer something that vanishes. Now it’s a saveable, searchable information asset. It works on any device. So users can make calls with their landline, Skype, iPhone,Android, BlackBerry, Windows7 or Symbian phone. 

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Clinithink joins LT-Innovate

Clinithink is a healthcare software company providing solutions which index unstructured clinical text in medical records and other healthcare data, thus exposing meaning and making the data "analyze-able" enabling providers and payers to drive efficiency.

Clinithink enables healthcare providers to extract knowledge from the clinical data currently trapped in the free-text of discharge summaries, clinical notes, and other documents. Using patent-pending algorithms and natural language processing to structure this currently unstructured data, Clinithink's CLiX technology enables the indexing, mapping and then analyzing of rich clinical narrative.

CLiX can be configured as a cloud-based solution and provided via the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. This makes it extremely flexible, scalable and cost-effective to integrate and consume in heterogeneous and legacy healthcare enterprise contexts.

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