Language Technology News for 2009

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Loquendo ready to support EMMA
2009/02/23

http://www.tmcnet.com/channels/speech-recognition/articles/51003-loque(...)
Global speech technology provider, Loquendo, has announced its congratulations for Multimodal Interaction Working Group for the publication of the Extensible MultiModal Annotation Markup Language (EMMA) as aW3C Recommendation. Designed to be a powerful language, EMMA benefits MultiModal applications, such as voice applications, by boosting performance through the provision of an enhanced interpretation of inputs through voice and other modalities. As the use of speech and voice technologies increase, EMMA has significant applications throughout the Web. EMMA contributes to the value of speech-enabled applications as it helps to create a richer presentation of speech input in the form of annotated ASR results, which can then be integrated into a voice platform. By improving the quality of speech, more companies will be able to implement self-service portals to support a growing customer base. An XML markup language, EMMA represents the interpretation of user input and annotations for confidence scores, timestamps, input medium and more in speech-enabled and multimodal applications.

Exploring a ‘Deep Web’ That Google Can’t Grasp
2009/02/22

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/23/technology/internet/23search.html?_r(...)
Google’s search engine trundled quietly past a milestone. It added the one trillionth address to the list of Web pages it knows about. But as impossibly big as that number may seem, it represents only a fraction of the entire Web. Beyond those trillion pages lies an even vaster Web of hidden data: financial information, shopping catalogs, flight schedules, medical research and all kinds of other material stored in databases that remain largely invisible to search engines. The challenges that the major search engines face in penetrating this so-called Deep Web go a long way toward explaining why they still can’t provide satisfying answers to questions like “What’s the best fare from New York to London next Thursday?” The answers are readily available — if only the search engines knew how to find them.

Conference to call for more research into the World Wide Web
2009/02/20

http://www.sciencecentric.com/news/article.php?q=09022005-conference-c(...)
The World Wide Web and its future development will be the focus of the first European conference on Web Science to be held in Athens from 18-20 March. The theme of the conference is 'Society on the Web' and it is the first conference to bring computer scientists, many of whom are from the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) together with social scientists so that they can explore together the human behaviour and technological design that shape the Web and its use. The conference, which is organised by the Web Science Research Initiative and the Foundation for the Hellenic World (FHW), will also include distinguished keynote speakers such as Noshir Contractor, Joseph Sifakis, Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt.

Bangor University to get £K120 grant setting up a research network for Speech and LT in Wales
2009/02/19

http://www.dailypost.co.uk/business-news/business-news/2009/02/19/bang(...)
COMPANIES involved in developing e-commerce and multimedia are among those being targeted for a language technologies cluster in north west Wales. Bangor University is getting a £120,000 grant to set up a research network for Speech and Language Technologies in Wales (SALT Cymru). The two-year grant will enable the university to set up a special interest group, with academics and industry working together to develop the use of software that deals with human languages. The project is supported by the Welsh Assembly Government’s Academic Expertise for Business programme – a £70m project supported by European funding. It will attract companies working in a bilingual or multilingual environment.

Researchers to determine contents of short-term memory by imaging
2009/02/18

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22201/?nlid=1789&a=f
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) looks more and more like a window into the mind. In a study published online in Nature, researchers at Vanderbilt University report that from fMRI data alone, they could distinguish which of two images subjects were holding in their memory--even several seconds after the images were removed. The study also pinpointed, for the first time, where in the brain visual working memory is maintained. Visual working memory allows us to briefly store and act upon specific details from images that we've seen: what color they are, how they're oriented, and how frequently they appear. But how and where these details are stored has remained a mystery. Early visual areas, which are the first to receive and process visual information, don't seem to stay active long enough to do the job. And higher visual areas don't have the machinery to retain such fine-grained details.

SAS Content Categorization illumintates unstructured and semistructured content
2009/02/16

http://au.sys-con.com/node/843196
Organizations are clamoring to purge content chaos. Applying search techniques to content that lacks a well-defined organizational structure just is not effective in gleaning value from data generated by applications, records, business processes, blogs, wikis and external sources proliferating in today’s organizations. Shipping now, SAS Content Categorization, from the leader in business analytics, correctly and meaningfully parses and analyzes enterprise content for entities and events. It creates robust metadata to trigger business processes that can improve organizational performance. The new standalone product is powered by a division of SAS, Teragram, the market leader in mobile and multilingual natural language processing technologies.

newstest
2009/02/15

http://www.zeenews.com/business/ice-economy/2009-02-26/510924news.html(...)
testnews

AI-based system to prevent from winter crashes
2009/02/12

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/north_east/7885460.stm
Academics said it would help councils improve road gritting efforts. RoadSafe has been developed by University of Aberdeen student Ross Turner and Banchory-based Aerospace and Marine International (AMI). It uses artificial intelligence technology and weather information to deliver the latest news quickly. The system has been piloted in trials, with positive feedback reported. Mr Turner said: "The aim of RoadSafe is to improve road conditions over the winter season by speeding up the delivery and enhancing the efficiency of the weather information which is passed on to council road maintenance departments. "The system is used to analyse the computer simulated weather forecast information and produce a draft forecast text. It uses what is known as natural language generation technology to break down the computer generated forecast into a standardised language where the same terminology is used every single time.

Scientists are now discovering the importance of structural changes to the genome
2009/02/12

http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/22109/?nlid=1774
About eight to twelve million years ago, the evolutionary ancestor to humans, chimpanzees, and orangutans appears to have undergone a burst of evolution, driven by duplicated sequences of DNA. This mechanism of genetic change, which has only recently come under scientific scrutiny, may have endowed primates with an evolutionary flexibility that drove the development of different great ape species, including humans. When a stretch of DNA is mistakenly duplicated, extra copies of the gene or genes within that region are added to the genome; those genes can then mutate separately. "Duplications are really important from an evolutionary perspective because they add a lot of variation to the genome," says Tomas Marques-Bonet, a scientist in Evan Eichler's lab at the University of Washington, in Seattle, who led the research. "These regions are rapidly evolving."

112: EU single emergency number must get multilingual
2009/02/11

http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/09/240&form(...)
EU citizens can contact emergency services from anywhere in the European Union by dialing 112, the EU-wide emergency number, free of charge from both fixed and mobile phones. But, only one in four Europeans knows that this life-saving number exists in other Member States and almost three in ten 112 callers in other countries have encountered language problems. The Commission, along with the European Parliament and the Council, declared "European 112 Day" to spread the word about 112 and push national authorities to make the EU's single emergency number more multilingual. "The European emergency number should no longer be Europe’s best kept secret. We have a single emergency number, 112, that works for every emergency and every Member State and every citizen that needs it. But it is unacceptable that less than a quarter of citizens are aware of 112, or that language barriers prevent travellers calling 112 from communicating with the emergency operator," said EU Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding. "The EU must work to guarantee the safety of our 500 million citizens with the same intensity as we have worked to guarantee their ability to travel freely across the borders of 27 countries. Europe's first 112 day should act as a wake up call to national authorities who need to improve the number of languages available in their 112 emergency centres and boost awareness about this life-saving number."

Vocalcom Spain and Loquendo announce strategic partnership
2009/02/11

http://www.crm2day.com/content/t6_librarynews_1.php?news_id=125662
Vocalcom, an international developer and integrator of contact center solutions, and Loquendo, global provider of speech technologies, today announced a strategic partnership through which Vocalcom Spain has integrated Loquendo ASR and Loquendo TTS into their product portfolio. With Natural Language - the solution from Vocalcom integrated within the Hermès family of platforms, companies from all market sectors can now offer a user experience based on natural language, significantly improving speech applications which until now only supported simple voice commands. The new solution enables enterprises to support "open questions" from callers. This feature is made possible by the understanding and dialogue system capabilities of Vocalcom’s Natural Language solution.

W3C recommendation for EMMA (Extensible MultiModal Annotation) released
2009/02/10

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-multimodal/2009Feb/0002.html
I am pleased to announce that Extensible MultiModal Annotation (EMMA) Version 1.0 was published as a W3C Recommendation. EMMA 1.0 is intended to be used to represent semantic interpretations for a variety of inputs, including but not necessarily limited to, speech, natural language text, GUI and ink input. It is expected that EMMA will be used primarily as a standard data interchange format between the components of a multimodal system.

LENA Foundation established to develop tools for early screening, diagnosis, research, and treatment of language delays
2009/02/10

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/lena-foundation-established-wi(...)
Terry and Judi Paul have established the not-for-profit LENA Foundation through a gift of $2 million and a donation of the assets of Infoture, Inc. Owned by the Pauls, Infoture developed the breakthrough LENA System in a $30 million research and development effort completed over the past five years. Assets donated include the LENA technology, a multimillion-dollar supercomputer, and a natural language corpus of over 75,000 hours of natural language audio recordings. Through this transformation, Infoture employees will become LENA Foundation employees, while the not-for-profit organization will remain based in the old Infoture building at 5525 Central Avenue in Boulder, Colorado.

SAS to achieve record revenue by adding 2.600 customers with recession-fighting solutions
2009/02/09

http://www.itcork.ie/index.cfm?page=news&newsId=1174
Business analytics leader SAS continued its unbroken chain of growth in 2008, logging global revenue of US$2.26 billion, up 5.1 percent over 2007 results. 'We achieved our 33rd year of revenue growth in the worst economy most can remember,' said CEO Jim Goodnight. 'This growth is a direct result of being a stable privately held company, which allows us to invest in long-term relationships with employees and customers.' SAS' strongest growth was in analytics, data mining and solutions that help organisations keep current customers and win new ones, manage risk and optimise processes. Goodnight said, 'In tough times, companies focus on optimising their businesses.' Henry Morris, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Software and Service Research at IDC, said, 'IDC surveys of business intelligence software buyers during 2008 show that a vendor's economic viability is gaining in priority as a factor in software selection. SAS' long-term record of continued year-over-year growth positions it favourably, therefore, in this economic downturn.'

Mindmapping software PersonalBrain 5.0 released
2009/02/06

http://www.prweb.com/releases/personalbrain5/released/prweb1828924.htm(...)
TheBrain Technologies announced that PersonalBrain 5.0, the latest version of its powerful information visualization and organization software is now available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. PersonalBrain 5.0 will be unveiled at Macworld 2009 at booth #3419, North Hall. PersonalBrain's award-winning dynamic interface enables users to link all ideas, files, and Web pages so people can better understand their information, see hidden connections, and liberate themselves from linear file organization. Current systems such as folders, search lists, and email fail to connect different concepts, people, projects and their digital information associatively. PersonalBrain gives users a conceptual space that puts ideas at the forefront, creating a dynamic network of visually connected Thoughts that represent the user's mind.