Google and Albanian

Even though with a few mistakes, Google does have an interface in Albanian. Yet, its language ID tools do not allow to search for pages only in Albanian. Until now, I have been using a little trick: I include the most frequent Albanian word "të" in a query and I get results from Albanian pages. Unfortunately, as discussed previously by David Beaver in Language Log's entry
Pass the hát, Google appears to also change "ë" in "e". Fortunately for Albanophiles, Yahoo maintains the difference by not folding the accented characters.

Read also Language Log and Technologies du Langage.

[just found out that, if the word containing diacritics is surrounded by quotes, Google will limit the search only to diacritic-marked-words]

The Google Translator

Slashdot | Coming Soon, The Google Translator: "Google gave journalists a glimpse of its next generation machine translation system at a May 19th Google Factory Tour." - A great publicity stunt from Google... and, as always in the MT world, it's 95% done. Let's hope Google (which needs billions of words in parallel corpora) or some other company (that doesn't need parallel corpora) start carving something out of that 5% left there for decades. Looking at these patents, it doesn't seem a very crowded field.

Still waiting for that first translation...

Will it be Google to reach this long lasting dream first? Maybe Fluent Machines still has an advantage... Nothing new in this aritcle from The Stanford Daily Online Edition: "Machine translations, for instance, have come a long way at Google.

“Historically, the approach to building machine translation systems is to have expert machine linguists write down dictionaries and rules on how to translate, say, from Chinese to English,” said researcher Franz Och. “Trying to write down all the rules on how to translate from Chinese to English is very hard.”

Instead, Google is fine-tuning a translation program that can automatically translate back and forth between documents in different languages — a sort of virtual Rosetta Stone.

Current machine translations are inconsistent at best, Och said. One current translation program translated “The White House confirmed the existence of a new bin Laden tape” in Arabic to “Alpine white new presence tape registered for coffee confirms Laden,” in English."

Washington Post uses Teragram

Teragram is doing well: After reading that NY Times uses their categorization engine, Washington Post is mentioned in Teragram News: "'Our paper covers all facets of news and is continually receiving updates, information and electronic content,' said John Whall, director of applications development for Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive (WPNI). 'The taxonomy management abilities of Teragram TK240 enable us to manage, process and present this constant flow of information in a way that is useful to our editors and, more importantly, our readers.'"

Computers Grading Students' Writing?

News: "SAGrader analyzes sentences and paragraphs, looking for keywords as well as the relationship between terms.

Other programs compare a student's paper with a database of already-scored papers, seeking to assign it a score based on what other similar-quality assignments have received.

Educational Testing Service sells Criterion, which includes the 'e-Rater' used to score GMAT essays. Vantage Learning has IntelliMetric, Maplesoft sells Maple T.A., and numerous other programs are used on a smaller scale. "

Les Européens unissent leurs forces pour créer une bibliothèque virtuelle

Les Européens unissent leurs forces pour créer une bibliothèque virtuelle: "La semaine dernière, le président de la République a donc lancéun programme de développement d'un nouveau moteur de recherche sur le Net franco-allemand avec le chancelier allemand Gerhard Schröder. Quaero – c'est son nom – sera dédié à l'image, au son et à la vidéo."

So, it is Quaero the name of the EU library project covered in more linguistically relevant detail by Mark Liberman at Language Log.

Microsoft IP Ventures - Natural Language Processing for Educational Courseware

Microsoft's research labs and developments teams, for years, have produced technologies that have been out of reach to outside entrepreneurs. Finally, they are making available their IP through Microsoft IP Ventures. Among other technologies, some of their NLP stuff is available as well:

Microsoft IP Ventures - Natural Language Processing for Educational Courseware: "Natural Language Processing for Educational Courseware creates dynamic learning programs from any static educational content consisting of questions from the material that continuously adapt to a student based on previous answers."

Based on NLPWin which processes English, Spanish, German, French, and Japanese, it could become a very effective tool for creating new and interesting learning tools. I wonder whether it could break the monopoly of classrooms in language teaching/learning.