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 - 4th 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: 

Swiftkey, the UK text input company, has brought out a new (beta) version of its predictive text input app for mobiles. X Keyboard is now an established member of the Android ecosystem with millions of downloads and plenty of paid-for added-value versions into the bargain. The secret ingredient is Swiftkey’s next word prediction technology. This keeps it ahead of the next-letter input models used by competing solutions, and won it the Most Innovative Mobile App at Global Mobile Awards in Barcelona earlier in 2012. By building up huge databases of word usage patterns, the company will probably be able to extend X Keyboard to specific user domains such as tablet-toting healthcare workers and similar enterprise input situations. The big question, of course, is whether speech input will ultimately win out over text input in the vast mobile device marketplace, and make virtual keyboards as old-hat as mouse ‘n keyboard hardware. Both techniques will most likely co-exist for some time.

The Language Learning Galaxy: 

The German company Speexx was awarded the 2012 Golden Engine Award for Strategically and Sustainably Driving China’s Education Industry last week, for the best contribution to improving the country’s education industry with a number of cloud-driven European language solutions. There are a number of signs that language learning will be impacted by the striking changes underway in the global learning marketplace. The publisher Pearson has just acquired GlobalEnglish to boost its position in the English language learning market, and the UK gaming app player Mindshape has been given funding to develop an innovative language learning game to be called Language City. It looks as if language learning aids can be adapted to any user platform, mobile or desktop, and benefit by leveraging data from users’ errors and successes through a cloud architecture. Just as the digital education agenda as a whole will morph towards College as a Service, language learning will need to take on more language processing smarts to customise courses and lessons (as we used to call them) more intelligently to individual profiles and needs.