Bibliotheque Numerique Francophone

About a year ago, LanguageLog derided the reaction of the head of the National Library of France. Since then, there have been several tries to defeat the evil Google. As "La République Internationale des Lettres" writes in very sarcastic terms, there is yet another effort but this time only Francophone... No hurry though: "Le projet reste pour l'instant au stade de la réflexion." The project is still in its reflection stage.

Bibliothèque Numérique Francophone: "Après Gallica, après la Bibliothèque Numérique Européenne, cap donc aujourd'hui vers la Bibliothèque Numérique Francophone. Nul doute qu'avec ce chef d'escadrille visionnaire, les éditeurs et autres milieux professionnels moutonniers du livre français lancés derrière lui dans le combat anti-Google sont en train de participer activement au futur rayonnement des savoirs, de la culture et de la langue française sur internet. Qui parlait de déclin de la France?"

Found in Translation - Military Information Technology

Found in Translation - Military Information Technology: "Spurred by the military and intelligence communities’ growing need to translate and retrieve pertinent foreign-language intelligence, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency has launched a program aimed at improving automated, searchable translations."

Speak It in Chinese, Hear It in English - Newsweek: International Editions - MSNBC.com

Speak It in Chinese, Hear It in English - Newsweek: International Editions - MSNBC.com: "A three-year EU project called TC-STAR is pumping €10 million into language-software R&D."
That's great - but - what's new in there? OCR? Siemens' MT (METAL)? In any case, everything seems to be two years away - even this statement is not new...

IBM's research juggling act | Tech News on ZDNet

IBM's research juggling act | Tech News on ZDNet

Paul Horn, the director of IBM Research: It continues to be a big thing for IBM and for IBM Research, but it's not just WebFountain. The basic issues are, really, natural language understanding in general. What WebFountain was able to do, which made it powerful, was it would go in and would scan text documents on the Web and it would understand enough about what people were saying that you could query it about what people were saying. You could imagine that there's a lot of countries, including our own, that would care a lot about scanning documents and even open documents and crawling through them to see what people were saying. A lot of the early work on WebFountain was done in three languages--English, Arabic and Chinese--and you can guess who might sponsor that work.

WebFountain is an example of a natural language technology that allows you to essentially analyze from an intelligence point of view what people are saying, but the important point is that this is just a small piece of many, many problems that companies have and where you want to take advantage of natural language understanding, such as translating spoken English to Russian and back again.

We talked about call centers. Natural language understanding can be incredibly powerful, even if you've got a call center operator, just by monitoring the calls and trying to understand what the issues are. There's enormous amounts of natural language and analytic issues in how companies interact with their customers. WebFountain was a specific application of natural language and search technology, but it's just one.

What's Next: Meet Your New Executives

What's Next: Meet Your New Executives

Nice article about the current developments in text mining.

...Text-mining engines, which can cost as little as a few thousands dollars, take up where Google leaves off, searching articles, webpages, blogs, and e-mail (and eventually, even mobile phone calls or television broadcasts) for ideas and even emotions, rather than specific terms...

Language Weaver Offers New Language Translation Module for Persian

Language Weaver, a leading developer of enterprise software for the automation of human language translation, today announced the commercial availability of a bidirectional Persian/English language pair module for its automated translation product. Persian may also be referred to as Farsi.
Bidirectional language pairs available include: Arabic/English, Chinese/English, Persian/English, French/English, and Spanish/English; unidirectional languages include Somali to English and Hindi to English.

OpenLogos

Members of the MT community may be interested in knowing, if they do not always do so, that the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) is offering the Logos Machine Translation System in an open-source derivative known as OpenLogos. OpenLogos runs on the Linux platform with PostgreSQL and maybe downloaded from http://logos-os.dfki.de/

This open-software offering is being made to individuals, universities and public institutions free-of-charge, with a view to its exploitation in both current and new language combinations.

OpenLogos is based upon the long-standing commercial, rule-driven Logos System owned by GlobalWare AG (Eisennach)
http://allpr.de/20096/GlobalWare-AG-und-DFKI-praesentieren-LOGOS-Open-Source.html

For those interested in knowing about the underlying linguistic technology of OpenLogos, the article Bernard (Bud) Scott: The Logos Model: An Historical Perspective. In: Machine Translation 18 (2003), pp. 1-72 provides a comprehensive overview of the Logos approach to machine translation.

An earlier on-line description of the linguistic and computational motivations for the Logos Model is available at http://iai.iai.uni-sb.de/iaien/iaiwp/p11/index.html

Bud Scott
Parse International, Inc.
bud.scott@verizon.net