How Do You Say... - WSJ.com

How Do You Say... - WSJ.com: "Google also has been developing its own translation software, which it uses to translate Web sites written in Chinese and Arabic. Google's technology is different from other translation software. Google feeds massive volumes of existing translations of text into a program, which uses that material to perform new translations by determining the statistical probability that a word or phrase in one language is equivalent to that of the other, says Peter Norvig, Google's director of research. The source text can include matching articles from news sites written in both Chinese and English, or European Union documents that are translated into the languages of the group's member countries, he says. Other translation technologies rely on preprogrammed dictionaries and grammatical rules to perform translations."

That's all the article says about the future... The rest is a look at the past, at technologies that have been invented in the 60's and early 70's of last century.

Taking on Google: Is Semantic Technology the Answer?

Taking on Google: Is Semantic Technology the Answer?: "The startups have one key advantage: Google is rapidly pushing into new markets such as word processing, online payment systems, and mobile devices. These new markets provide higher growth—and more satisfaction for Wall Street—than rebuilding its existing search engine would. That leaves an opening for upstarts – if they can provide users with a good enough reason to switch from Google’s powerful simplicity, said Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence. “These engines need to create incentives to change and reward people for their behavioral change,” he said. “If (semantic search engines) deliver, people will likely respond.”

Topics: Google, Search, Geron, Hakia, Tomio, Semantic, Semantic Search, Natural Language, Powerset, Radar Networks, Adaptive Blue "

Drudge Report links to language news

| News | This is London: "Following the operation William, a pupil at Hempland Primary School in York, was in hospital for more than four weeks. He lost the ability to read and write and his memory was also affected. But remarkably he was able to play the piano and trumpet much better than before. After he came out of hospital William went on a family holiday to Northumberland with his parents and brothers Alex, 16, and Edward, 15. 'William was playing on the beach,' said Mrs McCartney-Moore. 'He suddenly said, 'Look, I've made a sand castle' but really stretched the vowels out, which made him sound really posh. 'We all just stared back at him - we couldn't believe what we had just heard because he had a northern accent before his illness. 'But the strange thing was that he had no idea why we were staring at him - he just thought he was speaking normally.'"

Microsoft Launches Translation Service

Haven't seen much from Microsoft Research MT group. The latest papers listed in their website are from 2002. Maybe they are doing something in production now...

Microsoft Launches Translation Service: "Windows Live Translator's presentation is extremely interesting: the default view shows the original page and the translation side by side in two vertical frames. If you hover over a sentence in one of the pages, the sentence is highlighted in both pages. If you scroll in one of the pages, the other page performs the same action. This is an interesting approach especially for those who speak both languages fairly well or want to learn a new language. Unfortunately, it's difficult to read a page that requires to scroll horizontally."

You can't index meaning...

» Hakia, a meaning-based search engine: "You can’t index meaning “You can’t index meaning,” Riza explains. ”You can only index words, addresses, and URLs.” “We have invented a new system called Qdexing, which is specifically designed for meaning representation. Qdex means query detection and extraction. This entails analyzing the entire content of a webpage, then extracting all possible queries that can be asked to this content, at various lengths and forms. These queries become gateways to the originating documents, paragraphs and sentences during the retrieval mode. Note that this is done off-line before any actual query is received from a user.”"

IBM Research | Almaden Research Center | Computer Science

IBM Research Almaden Research Center Computer Science: "An increasingly important class of keyword search tasks are those where users are looking for a specific piece of information buried within a few documents in a large collection. Examples include searching for (a) someone's phone number or a package tracking URL, within a personal email collection, (b) reviews from blogs and (c) internal homepage for a person or a group within the company intranet. While modern information extraction techniques can be used to extract the concepts involved in these tasks (persons, phone numbers, restaurant reviews, etc.), since users only provide keywords as input, the problem of identifying the documents that contain the information of interest remains a challenge.
In Avatar Semantic Search, we are building a solution to this problem based on the concept of automatically generating ``interpretations'' of keyword queries. Interpretations are precise structured queries, over the extracted concepts, that model the real intent behind a keyword query. We have formalized the notion of interpretations and are addressing the various challenges in identifying the most likely interpretations for a given keyword query. The resulting interpretations are presented in an intuitive interface resulting in a dialogue between the user and the system to determine the true user intent (as shown in the screenshots below).
[Screenshot 1] [Screenshot 2] "

Technology Review: The Future of Search

Technology Review: The Future of Search: "The two biggest projects are machine translation and the speech project. Translation and speech went all the way from one or two people working on them to, now, live systems."