Expert System announces the latest release of its Cogito semantic technology that takes Big Data management to the next level

Expert System, the semantic software company, member of LT-innovate, announces the latest release of its Cogito semantic technology, fortified with features to better support management of Big Data.

Given the quantity and diversity of information available, organizations need tools that provide a comprehensive view, not just single data points. Thanks to the ability to understand words in context, Cogito tackles the growing amount of unstructured information that often goes unanalyzed, but, when properly managed, can be the tipping point for competitive advantage. “The advantage of a semantic approach is its ability to provide access to unstructured information that, when integrated into your existing data, adds great depth and insight.” said Luca Scagliarini, VP, Strategy & Business Development, Expert System. 

The newest release of Cogito supports complex decision making by accessing all of the data available inside and outside the organization.

More information about this new release of Cogito

The LTi News Roundup - 4th May 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.

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


Intelligent content:

The Polish company Positionly has netted another round of funding to develop its SEO analytics solution that informs companies large and small about their positioning on web search results without needing to know anything about the topic. A great example of how language-sensitive functionality can make self-knowledge easier for busy companies. The venerable Italian lang tech developer SynTHEMA has netted a contract with the Italia newspaper La Stampa to automatically categorise editorial content using semantic technology. And the Irish start-up SindiceTech is helping companies derive real business value (and not just technical advance) from the linkage power of semantic web data.

Thanks to Manx: 

A special mention this week for the exemplary efforts of the Isle of Man - one of Europe’s smallest countries (80K population) and one of the world’s oldest continuous parliamentary bodies. The Manx parliament has digitised and published online a large collection of its records, making them easy to search and treat as a data resource for anything from linguists to lawyers. And it has been experimenting with speech recognition technology (developed partly by the UK firm VoicePower) to ensure that its current parliamentary records are captured live as a speech stream as well as being converted into text (and edited) to speed up the publication process.

Speaking of Market Size: 

Common Sense Advisory published its latest projection for 2012 on the market for outsourced translation and interpretation services from some 21,000 suppliers, sized at $33.5B, growing by 12.17% annually. The language technology portion of this sum was not communicated about directly, and the figure does not of course include the size of the in-company translation workload. Meanwhile the global speech recognition is set to market to grow by 15.65% over the next three or so years according to another market research firm. Which suggests some kind of uniform growth rate in these very different sectors. The fact is that the world’s translation activity as a whole (either paid for or free) is a vast below-the-radar market, often unrelated to technology. We therefore have little useful knowledge of its true size. Speech recognition on the other hand is exclusively mediated through technology and much easier to map. But perhaps the most fascinating data this week came from YouTube, with a claim that 4B videos are viewed every day, 70% of them from outside of the U.S. A trove of speech genres, images, and languages just waiting to become a useful resource, unless Google monetises it first!

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.

La Stampa Chooses Semantic Technology to Improve Content Management

The leading Italian national newspaper La Stampa and Expert System today announce selection of the Cogito semantic software to improve the management of La Stampa’s editorial content. In the publishing world, rapid evolution of technology and fierce competition require adoption of new business models to stay ahead. Using Cogito, Expert System applies semantic technology to La Stampa’s online content, enriching it with metadata and enabling greater search and knowledge management, simplifying access and distribution of content and offering users more interactive tools for navigation and sharing. Semantic technology automatically processes articles published daily in both the print and online edition, associating each item with one or more relevant categories. In addition to an improved classification of news, La Stampa can now perform automatic tagging of items by identifying and extracting the information in content. This helps readers access new content related to the news they are reading, increasing both the time spent on the site, and the number of pages viewed for each access.

More information about the full article on Expert System

Speexx Wins the 2012 Golden Engine Award in China for Education Technology

Speexx, the leading online language training provider, has been awarded with the prestigious 2012 Golden Engine Award for Strategically and Sustainably Driving China’s Education Industry. Speexx took the top spot in the ‘Best contribution to the improvement of the education industry’ category. The national award has been initiated by the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology and it was presented to Speexx by China’s biggest computer software magazine ‘China Information World’ at the 16th Chinese international software exposition in Beijing today.

More information about Speexx winning the Golden Engine Award.

Irish Start-Up Sindice To Develop Value-based Semantic Web Technologies

Based at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) in Galway, SindiceTech is developing new internet technologies based around advanced data management for enterprises. The company, a spin-out of NUI Galway, was set up by Giovanni Tummarello and Renaud Delbru with a team in DERI last year. 

Eight people are now working with SindiceTech and the company is looking to add three more. "Previous attempts of commercialising general semantic web technology have not focused in on the value and have failed," said Tummarello. "The alchemy here is combining large data processing capabilities with some of the principles of the semantic web, which have matured now and are an appealing value proposition for knowledge intensive technologies." 

SindiceTech helps large enterprises build their own strategic linked data clouds. The company was originally developed out of a research project around a search engine for the semantic web. 

More information about the full article on The Sunday Business Post

Almost Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Translation

Ms. Lola Bendana, Director of Multi-Languages Corporation, and Mr. Alan Melby, Professor of Linguistics at Brigham Young University, just published a book together: "Almost Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Translation".

There are two parts : the first one is for everyone and "especially for those involved in requesting translation services" and the other one is especially for Translators and Project Managers.

This publication is freely available : click here