European Software Companies need a Language Cloud

The high reply rate in a recent survey amongst LT-Innovate members calls for a European Language Cloud.

Language Technology firms experience a strong growth and almost all are hiring.

Companies need language technology to communicate with their increasingly global customer base. Moreover, the data revolution and advances in human-machine interaction depend on understanding natural languages. Unfortunately Europe’s SMEs struggle to satisfy this striking demand. Many software innovations, but also basic functions such as search, work only well in English. Whoever works with languages faces soon the demand for supporting many languages... or to remain a small national player. Many EU institutions, for example, demand the equal support of their 24 official languages.

Support for many languages is cost-prohibitive, because it has to be developed individually per language. No surprise that an overwhelming majority of the industry would thus make use of a basic language infrastructure which provides features such as lemmatization or named entity detection. Higher level functions and services face some skepticism, since they might be competing with commercial offers. However, judging by the percentage of companies ready to use a cloud service and the fact that they are willing to pay a price for using it (preferably to a non-profit organisation), the need for a Language Cloud appears to be well established.

Hardly any European company can address all language needs of global customers. Besides the technical infrastructure, many LT-Innovate members thus share the vision of the European Language Cloud as a SaaS wrapper. They want to provide and monetize their specific capability while leveraging components of other providers.

What are your views? Please share them with us by commenting on this article!

Jochen Hummel, Chairman of the Board of Directors, LT-Innovate - CEO, ESTeam

See survey results.

CABI Automates its Semantic Enrichment Process and Interlinks its Content with TEMIS's Luxid®

CABI chooses the best-in-class semantic content enrichment solution to enhance its content, boost audience engagement, and strategically expand its product line.

TEMIS, the leading provider of Semantic Content Enrichment solutions has signed a strategic agreement with CABI, an inter-governmental, not-for-profit organization providing information and applying scientific expertise to solve problems in agriculture and the environment.

Two key trends that CABI faces as a major publisher of scientific information are the exponential growth rate of the volume of published articles on one hand, and on the other the emergence of the "Web of Data", which is shaping a demand for more structured data products in addition to traditional information products based on content.

To address these trends, CABI has decided to optimize its content indexing which was previously primarily manual, by integrating TEMIS's Luxid® Content Enrichment Platform in its content management workflow. CABI's first objective is to make efficiency gains through automation and reduce indexing costs associated with the increase of content volumes while ensuring high levels of metadata quality. The rich semantic metadata extracted from its content will enable more sophisticated search, navigation and discovery tools on CABI's online portals, promoting greater user engagement. Luxid®'s semantic enrichment pipeline will furthermore enable the extraction from text of structured information as well as semantic relationships, enabling CABI to create linked data products connected to the larger Web of Data.

"As a database publisher with many decades of experience in metadata and content indexing, we are very excited to be working with TEMIS to take our semantic enrichment endeavors to a whole new level. This will allow us to improve existing products, but more importantly to create new value from the rapidly growing content assets within our portfolio. We see this as a major step towards achieving our goal to be the world's leading source of knowledge and insights in agriculture and related disciplines," said Andrea Powell, Executive Director, Publishing, CABI.

The full press release is available here.

The Future of Travel: Translation Apps

If you’ve travelled you’ve had this experience. The one where you awkwardly fumble a half formed sentence in a language you can’t really speak. You mix a bit of English in with the other language and hope through exaggerated hand gestures and repeating yourself in a loud voice, that somehow the language barrier will be breached. 

One day such embarrassments will be a thing of the past, and that day is not far off. Both iOS and Windows Phone have some great apps for translating speech in real time. It’s kind of like the universal translator from Star Trek or the Babel fish from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Google announced they were moving in this direction over a year ago, developing real time speech translation apps for Android and iOS. Eventually they intend to release an app which can translate phone conversations as they happen.

The iOS app Sendboo has a free version available with ads or a paid version without. It can translate over 30 languages. There are still problems with distinguishing between speech and background noise, and poor internet connection can cause lag, but these problems will inevitably be overcome with time. Windows Phone has an equivalent app called Translator with Speech from Brillisoft. It costs £2.29 and has now comes with a load of new language packs, making a total of 54. You speak into the mouthpiece and it speaks the translation right back at you. Technology like this will change the way we think about global travel. The new languages include Afrikaans, Arabic, Hebrew, and Malay in version 2.2 (only for Windows Phone 8).

You can access all of the languages as long as long you have a connection. For those tricky times when there’s no internet, you can use the offline option which includes 10 pre-installed language files with popular tourist phrases like "Where's the toilet".  The app also saves your translated words so that you don’t need to connect to hear them again.

Whichever operating system you use, you can probably get a great translation app for your phone already. The really exciting stuff is just around the corner and will change the face of translation technology as we know it. But no matter how advanced translation technology gets, it will never bring about an absolutely perfect translation between languages because no such thing really exists. 

It takes a human mind to understand the nuances of language and intended meaning. These apps might be great for ordering food on holiday, but you can’t use them in an international business meeting or to translate literature. I don’t imagine professional translators will be out of a job anytime in the near future.

Guest blog from Tom Rowsell, a technology and language geek who works for EmpowerLingua translations. They have a blog on their website which keeps you up to date with the latest in the field of translations and interpreting services. 

LT for Hire: NLP Recruiting Gets Business-friendly

In a recent Expert System blog on 10 Semantic Technology Trends for 2014 that the Italian company has identified, trend 4 is boldly entitled “The Programmer of the Future is a Linguist” and claims that “the role of the linguist to bridge the gap between meaning and contextual relevance will become an essential part of technology applications.”

In other words, however much we try and automate the processes of understanding what a web page, a query, a text or even just a single sentence means, we know that the expert human linguist will still be a crucial factor in programming machines to understand better.

This role, by the way, was amply brought home in early December, when the UK firm Crystal Semantics was acquired by a media tech company: most of the commentary highlighted the fact that the founder David Crystal’s team of linguists took ten years to handcraft a disambiguation and categorisation engine for English (and other language) web pages that would aid a “sense” engine to understand the gist of polysemic words. Machine learning clearly can’t do it all.

To find out more about the job market for such linguists, LT Innovate talked to Maxim Khalilov the founder of NLPeople and Nick Gallimore at Natural Language Recruiter, the language technology wing of the mployability site in the UK, to find out more about job needs in the LT industry as a whole.

Maxim Khalilov started the NLPeople site in May 2012, and now publishes around 60-80 jobs for researchers and scientists in industry per month, finding demand to be fairly stable. New rounds of European Commission-funded projects tend to spark a rise in demand, and he also noted a “moderate increase of about 5-10 %” in October 2012, May 2012 and June 2013, probably due to business expansion activities among big players on the NLP market. His primary focus is in fact on the research community, so his data do not necessarily reflect the global job scene.

Nick Gallimore has been working exclusively on job openings in the LT industry under the general mployability banner for three years now, and decided to focus on the LT industry via the dedicated Natural Language Recruiter brand. He himself is passionate about language and technology and is keen to build credibility in this fast-growing space.  

For him, job openings in the field fluctuate considerably from month-to-month. “It takes companies quite a long time to hire people (their requirements are often very different to research organisations) so it's not usually clear how ‘new’ a vacancy is.” But quoting figures that are close to those cited by NLPeople, “we see 250-350 job openings in industry each year in Europe, and a similar level each year in the US. We also believe that there is quite a lot of commercial-side hiring in the LT space that takes place ‘under the radar’.”

Which LT fields do these jobs address? Khalilov sees increased demand in the machine translation industry in Europe and in the USA, as well as more positions for speech processing experts. The latest tendency is crowdsourcing – “we regularly receive jobs submitted as a part of various language crowdsourcing projects.” And of course the data analytics/data scientist segment offers a growing number of exciting openings for NLP people.

Not surprisingly, NLP developers with the hands-on implementation experience are much in demand. A solid NLP background knowledge is mostly required, in some cases in combination with the language expertise. Language technology researchers and scientists with proven coding skills are taking second place.

What sorts of companies are advertising for NLP expertise? NLPeople receives lot of jobs from the recruitment agencies which, in many cases, prefer not to reveal the actual employer. A second major segment covers jobs at the “IT monsters”. Although Khalilov sees great potential in other companies needing NLP expertise, he reckons that they mostly “prefer to buy solutions and focus on integration only.” Then there are the NLP-oriented start-ups that typically require a broad outlook of computational linguistics, data mining and machine learning technologies.

Geographically speaking, Natural Language Recruiter works worldwide, even though the initial focus is on the UK. “We have clients in the UK, US, France, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands and China as LT is a truly international space,” says Gallimore.

For Khalilov, the USA is an “absolute leader on the industrial NLP market” – especially on the West Coast and in the Greater New York area. In Europe, there are a large number of localization jobs in Ireland “the localization Mecca of the Old World.”

A noticeable number of start-ups concentrating their efforts on the interface between NLP and machine learning appeared in 2011-2013 in France, Germany and Spain. While in Germany these new companies tend to stick close to big university centres, in France and Spain virtually 100% of them are in the Paris and Barcelona areas respectively.

Overall, then, LT jobs are on the rise. Let’s hope the LT industry harvests the benefits. 

LTC upgrades Deutsche Post DHL's translation management infrastructure

Deutsche Post DHL has extended its partnership with LTC, The Language Technology Centre, for a managed technology solution in corporate language services, including LTC Worx multilingual business-management system for global companies.

Doing business in more than 220 countries and territories demands more than high quality translation and localization; Deutsche Post also needs to maintain an advanced system to manage multilingual business processes and other business functions such as resource allocation and budgeting.

“LTC has been a large scale provider of language services and technology to Deutsche Post since 2000, and we have enjoyed an excellent ongoing business relationship,” explained Dr Adriane Rinsche, Managing Director at LTC. “During this time language needs have developed to support global operations, and LTC supports Deutsche Post in managing a clear strategy for multilingual content.”

This extended partnership with Deutsche Post will see advanced automation options, the continued hosting of the LTC Worx SaaS solution, and importantly LTC will also host the Kilgray memoQ 2013 translation environment as part of the complete translation management solution.

“Technology solutions such as LTC Worx and memoQ have allowed the Corporate Language Service (CLS) at Deutsche Post to plan, track and report on important language projects. This supports the innovation required to achieve our goal: to enable our customers within DPDHL and our subsidiaries to act globally, overcoming language barriers” said Doro Meyer-Veit, Head of CLS.

“The memoQ translation environment allows you to carry out many precise functions such as managing multiple packages in one, multilingual project,” said István Lengyel, Kilgray CEO. “By using LTC Worx and memoQ together, users can manage projects with complete control and this makes life a lot easier.”

LTC language services have covered many different subject areas including logistics, infrastructure, environment, law, IT, marketing and more. The LTC Worx system has enabled the management of flexible and controlled multilingual processes. 

The solution facilitates the design of unique workflows and gives control over the complete end-to-end process. DPDHL use memoQ 2013 and LTC Worx to drive down operational costs with advanced applications.

The full press release.

Crystal Semantics: From Disambiguation Research to Smart Online Advertising Analyst

Crystal Semantics, one of the most singular European language tech companies and an LT-Innovate Prize-winner, has changed hands again. Previously owned by the Dutch media company ad pepper Media (from 2006), it was sold last week to the media monitoring giant WPP’s digital’s marketing technology company 24/7 Media which will in turn be merging with the technology company Xaxis early in 2014.

Why the interest in Crystal Semantics and its 15 employees split fairly evenly between engineers developing the technology and semantic linguists?

The UK company uses proprietary technology to read web pages for their total (fully disambiguated) meaning in real time, thereby enabling an advertising agent to know exactly what is contained on the target web page where they might wish to place their advertisements. The kind of brands that WPP and others provide monitoring services for want to ensure that they do not get their adverts placed on a page of web content that is semantically inappropriate to their brand image – i.e. containing porn, political incorrectness, tobacco, alcohol, etc.

By buying into Crystal Semantics technology, media managers can ensure an automated understanding of content, and therefore benefit from an optimised guide to placement for their clients’ adverts in the cut-throat world of brand competition.

What makes the company so singular in the European technology landscape is that the underlying technology was originally developed as a use-neutral, almost academic attempt to digitise an English dictionary with all its multifarious word meanings. An encyclopaedic subject matter taxonomy was then used to assign a web page to a category on the basis of the interacting word meanings, giving an accurate picture of its fundamental message.

The progenitor of this effort – David Crystal – is an eminent linguist in the UK, with a remarkable track record of linguistic inquiry, ranging from speech therapy to indexing, via stylistics, consulting for the government and linguistics education for the general public. The company website claims that the effort of developing the semantic network – called the Sense Engine - that underlies the company’s application took over ten years. It was largely carried out with the Dutch AND Publishers in the mid-1990s and represented “one of the largest language engineering projects ever undertaken.”

Under the new ownership, will this core resource, which used to be available as a service for web page analysis, continue to aid others in providing semantic disambiguation?

Tomorrow, the world of brand advertising management on the web will be genuinely global, and Crystal Semantics, now part of the Xaxis technology stack for WPP, will need to extend its semantic expertise beyond the dozen or so European languages it covers today and adapt to target languages throughout Asia and elsewhere, despite the low expectations for advertising growth according to WPP’s boss.

Horizon 2020 Work Programmes 2014/15 published today!

After the final adoption yesterday, the European Commission published the Horizon 2020 Work Programmes today. 

All programmes and ancillary documents such as model contracts, rules of participation etc. can be found at: 

http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/portal/desktop/en/funding/reference_docs.html