Welcome to Language Technology World (August, 31st, 2009)

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Last updated: August 31st, 2009

LT World is the most comprehensive WWW information service and knowledge source on the wide range of technologies that deal with human language. The service is provided by the German Language Technology Competence Center at DFKI. Contents will constantly be improved. Please send corrections and pointers to missing information to feedback@lt-world.org.

SHORT NEWS

WHAT ELSE . . .

	Romanian woman awarded by Obama for research in NLP.
	BBN Technologiew awarded $30 Million in defense funding to teach machines reading.
	TDA launched as a supercloud for the global translation industry.
	Lionbridge to secure agreement with Dell for global online content preparing material across 30 languages.
	Apptek launched "Quick Translate" free online Machine Translation service for more than 23 languages.
	Avatar firm Next IT to incorporate Language Weaver's solution.
	Customer support with Virtual Agents reduces costs.
	Gesture-based interfaces bringing technology back to the roots of language.
	Tilde released a EuroTermBank terminology panel for Microsoft Word.
	Phase2 announces Tattler: intelligent content processor using the Open Calais API.
	hakia revealed approach on "Commercial Ontology".
	Corwdsouring the semantics of numbers with True#.
	Web companies to develop "Common Tag" Format.
	Idiomizer - a translation reference for idiomatic exchange across multiple languages.
	Does Linked Data need RDF?
	Zepheira announced Freemix - new social networking site for data sharing.
	Ontoprise released Semantic MediaWiki+ 1.4.4.
	Free Semantic Web modeling tool TopBraid arrived from TopQuadrant
	Empolis Research & Discovery annouced KMWorld's trend setting product of 2009.

	Microsoft's Bing to team up with Wolfram Alpha.
	Microsoft and Yahoo finally striked a partnership.
	Wolfram Alpha to open up data feeds.
	Chinese search engine Baidu is growing at a dizzying speed.
	Ask.com and Ask Jeeves launched database of 300 million answers and questions.
	ChaCha Voice Search on iPhone Outperforms Voice-enabled Search from Giants Google & Yahoo!
	Institute for Infocomm Research completed Asian network-based Speech-to-Speech translation system.
	Sakhr Software to acquire Dial Directions for mobile voice, text translation applications.
	Newmium's Dr Parse to take a holistic view of Parsing Technology.
	Customer Service supported by NLP technology.
	NSF-funded Decipher project to analyze text from antiquity.
	EC-funded project to analyze time codes in Aboriginal languages.
	Classifying sounds clears up 100-year-old mystery.
	Expert System develops automated support for Google's Rich Snippets.
OTHER NEWS

	Health Story project to develop standard for "Meaningful Use" of Electronic Health Records (EHR).
	New Rule Interchange Format (W3C RIF) Standard published.
	China backtracks on PC software filters.
	CMU algorithm charts evolution of genetic networks during fruit fly life cycle.
	English passes a million words.
	Wikipedia gets ready for Video integration.
	Nature announced the journal of the century.
	Research Center JÃ¼lich to host fastest Computer in Europe.

All Kinds of Cool
... the Way the Web sees you ...

Just enter your name at the Personas project website and this innovative art project that is part of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab will search the web for information and with its sophisticated natural language processing will create a portrait of your online identity.

Personas shows you a prose-like, colorful and shockingly accurate visual portrait of how the Internet sees you. While the algorithm compiles your information into predetermined categories you can view the computational process at each stage of the process.

Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

The process of it scouring the web for you name is probably actually cooler than the result.

From the Personas website:
In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrate the computer's uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.

From the masks of actors in ancient Greek dramas, Carl Jungâs personality constructs to marketer's âpersonasâ user types, we can add one more âselfâ to the repertoire of masks we wear when facing the world. Now we know how WWW sees us.