We were all surprised when even Dragon Systems (like most NLP companies at that time) gave up and decided to sell to their biggest competitor, but as this article demonstrates, it wasn't that simple...
Goldman Sachs and a Sale Gone Horribly Awry - NYTimes.com: "The deal, the $580 million sale of a highflying technology company, Dragon Systems, had just been approved by its board and congratulations were being exchanged. But even then, at that moment of celebration, there was a sense that something was amiss.
The chief executive of Dragon had received a congratulatory bottle from the investment bankers representing the acquiring company, a Belgian competitor called Lernout & Hauspie. But he hadn’t heard from Dragon’s own bankers at Goldman Sachs."
'via Blog this'
Monday, July 16, 2012
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Official google.org Blog: The Endangered Languages Project: Supporting language preservation through technology and collaboration
Official google.org Blog: The Endangered Languages Project: Supporting language preservation through technology and collaboration: " Endangered Languages Project, a website for people to find and share the most up-to-date and comprehensive information about endangered languages. Documenting the 3,000+ languages that are on the verge of extinction (about half of all languages in the world) is an important step in preserving cultural diversity, honoring the knowledge of our elders and empowering our youth. Technology can strengthen these efforts by helping people create high-quality recordings of their elders (often the last speakers of a language), connecting diaspora communities through social media and facilitating language learning."
Monday, January 16, 2012
Solving the Machine Translation Problem - Forbes
Solving the Machine Translation Problem - Forbes: "The problem being of course that machines don’t actually “get” language very well. Don’t appreciate the richness of meaning, understand the rather sly way in which what looks like almost exactly the same phrase can have a very different meaning indeed dependent upon context.
The solution is simply to not have machines doing the translation. Instead, offer free language lessons to those who want to learn another language. Their test pieces, their exercises, will be the pieces that you are being paid to translate."
'via Blog this'
The solution is simply to not have machines doing the translation. Instead, offer free language lessons to those who want to learn another language. Their test pieces, their exercises, will be the pieces that you are being paid to translate."
'via Blog this'
Monday, October 31, 2011
Google Translate It already speaks 57 languages as well as a 10-year-old. How good can it get? By Jeremy Kingsley
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/10/google_translate_will_google_s_computers_understand_languages_be.single.html
"A computer that translates "natural language" is the holy grail of artificial intelligence—language being so integral to our intelligence and to our humanness that to crack it would be to achieve artificial consciousness itself. But until relatively recently, attempts at it have mostly sucked. They’ve tended to mix the words of one language with the grammar of the other, getting both wrong in the process. Mostly, this is the fault of literal translation—the kind of process that translates kindergarten as children garden. Newer methods—dominated by Google—turn the problem around: Using data, statistics, and brute force, they succeed in part by their refusal to "deconstruct" language and teach meaning to computers in the traditional way."
"A computer that translates "natural language" is the holy grail of artificial intelligence—language being so integral to our intelligence and to our humanness that to crack it would be to achieve artificial consciousness itself. But until relatively recently, attempts at it have mostly sucked. They’ve tended to mix the words of one language with the grammar of the other, getting both wrong in the process. Mostly, this is the fault of literal translation—the kind of process that translates kindergarten as children garden. Newer methods—dominated by Google—turn the problem around: Using data, statistics, and brute force, they succeed in part by their refusal to "deconstruct" language and teach meaning to computers in the traditional way."
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Doug Cutting talks about Hadoop, and open source | ITworld
Doug Cutting talks about Hadoop, and open source | ITworld: "Doug Cutting has changed the way that IT does Big Data. Hadoop, the Open Source project he started, has made it so that any company with access to a rack of commodity PCs and a reasonable amount of programming skill can do the type of large scale data analysis work that was previously done only on supercomputers. Enterprises such as Amazon, eBay, Facebook and IBM, all the way to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors are taking advantage of tremendous value offered by this Open Source hit. Hadoop is a game changer."
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Why Harry Potter's Latest Trick Is to Speak a Syrian Dialect - WSJ.com
Why Harry Potter's Latest Trick Is to Speak a Syrian Dialect - WSJ.com: "DUBAI, United Arab Emirates—When Khulud Abu-Homos, a television producer at OSN network here, decided to dub the Harry Potter movies into Arabic for distribution in the Middle East, she faced a quandary: which Arabic?
The Arab world, it turns out, isn't one world at all. It's a collection of overlapping worlds that harbor a dizzying array of diverse people, cultures and language. The rest of the world noticed this recently in the varied ways the Arab Spring democracy movements have played out."
The Arab world, it turns out, isn't one world at all. It's a collection of overlapping worlds that harbor a dizzying array of diverse people, cultures and language. The rest of the world noticed this recently in the varied ways the Arab Spring democracy movements have played out."
Monday, July 18, 2011
From Technologist to Philosopher - Manage Your Career - The Chronicle of Higher Education
From Technologist to Philosopher - Manage Your Career - The Chronicle of Higher Education: "Getting a humanities Ph.D. is the most deterministic path you can find to becoming exceptional in the industry. It is no longer just engineers who dominate our technology leadership, because it is no longer the case that computers are so mysterious that only engineers can understand what they are capable of. There is an industrywide shift toward more 'product thinking' in leadership—leaders who understand the social and cultural contexts in which our technologies are deployed.
Products must appeal to human beings, and a rigorously cultivated humanistic sensibility is a valued asset for this challenge. That is perhaps why a technology leader of the highest status—Steve Jobs—recently credited an appreciation for the liberal arts as key to his company's tremendous success with their various i-gadgets.
It is a convenient truth: You go into the humanities to pursue your intellectual passion; and it just so happens, as a by-product, that you emerge as a desired commodity for industry. Such is the halo of human flourishing."
Products must appeal to human beings, and a rigorously cultivated humanistic sensibility is a valued asset for this challenge. That is perhaps why a technology leader of the highest status—Steve Jobs—recently credited an appreciation for the liberal arts as key to his company's tremendous success with their various i-gadgets.
It is a convenient truth: You go into the humanities to pursue your intellectual passion; and it just so happens, as a by-product, that you emerge as a desired commodity for industry. Such is the halo of human flourishing."