Language Technology News for 2011

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MIT Professor gives language lessons to computers
2011/09/15

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/mit-professor-gives-language-less(...)
Regina Barzilay, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is trying to make computers better listeners by making them play Civilization, a 20-year-old strategy game in which players build a city into an empire by vanquishing and absorbing neighboring cultures. The computer “reads” the manual and then keeps returning to it while playing. As it races through thousands of simulations, the computer learns to connect words in the directions (“attack,” “build,” “capture,” and “revolt”) as the game unfolds. The computer gets positive reinforcement—a higher score and a win—when it makes correct guesses about the meaning of words. When the computer loses, it traces back through its reading of the manual to see where its interpretation went wrong. A similar program without access to the manual won the game 46 percent of the time; after reading the instructions, Barzilay’s computer won 79 percent of the time.

Next on Twitter's Flight Path: Greater China and Southeast Asia
2011/09/15

http://www.commonsenseadvisory.com/Default.aspx?Contenttype=ArticleDet(...)
When we visited Twitter in San Francisco earlier this year, the international team was hard at work on several languages, supported by crowdsourced translation communities. Their efforts will once again bear fruit over the next week or so as the company releases localized versions of Twitter in Chinese (Simplified and Chinese), Hindi, Filipino (Tagalog), and Malay, bringing its language count to 17. Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish round out the group.

Dachis Group launched Social Business Index for analysis through Social Channels
2011/09/14

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hinchcliffe/the-new-social-business-index-se(...)
The new Social Business Index seeks to bring enterprise insight to social media. New tools are emerging all the time to sift through social media and help companies determine their impact and relevance in the new medium. The freely available Social Business Index is a new melding of big data and social media to help companies get an comprehensive view of how they are represented in the world of social business.

EC opens consultation on the ERA towards an "Innovation Union" - submission deadline Nov, 30th, 2011
2011/09/13

http://ec.europa.eu/research/consultations/era/consultation_en.htm
This public consultation aims at gathering views and evidence from stakeholders on the key obstacles which have to be tackled to achieve a well-functioning ERA. Completing ERA will require the support and effort of all EU Member States and Associated Countries and their stakeholders (e.g. research performing organisations including universities, funding organisations, researchers, private sector and civil society).

A New and Improved Moore's Law
2011/09/13

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/38548/?nlid=nldly&nld=2011-0(...)
Researchers have, for the first time, shown that the energy efficiency of computers doubles roughly every 18 months. The conclusion, backed up by six decades of data, mirrors Moore's law, the observation from Intel founder Gordon Moore that computer processing power doubles about every 18 months. But the power-consumption trend might have even greater relevance than Moore's law as battery-powered devices—phones, tablets, and sensors—proliferate.

Métier mines text to improve a company’s performance
2011/09/13

http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/13/demo-metier-mines-text/
In large companies, it’s all too easy for employees to duplicate work or fall out of sync with the company’s strategy. Métier‘s workforward product uses natural language processing (NLP) and semantic matching to help managers find the right employee to work on a project, speed up project planning and ensure that company strategy is actually being executed.

€110K prize money for semantic web app
2011/09/13

http://www.netmagazine.com/news/110k-prize-money-semantic-web-app-1113(...)
Open source community Interactive Knowledge Stack (IKS) is offering five large lumps of investment in a contest to design a semantic web app. IKS is a project partly funded by the EU that works on building an open technology platform that integrates with CMSes to deliver semantic web functionality. Finished integrations already exist for some of the big CMSes, including WordPress, Drupal Nuxeo, Confluence, and Alfresco.

Health Insurer WellPoint puts IBM's Watson to work
2011/09/12

http://www.insurancenetworking.com/news/health_insurance_watson_jeopar(...)
Looking to augment human decision making in health care, WellPoint Inc. says it will employ technology from IBM that is a commercial variant of the company's famed Watson project. The health insurer says the same ability to answer questions posed in natural language the technology exhibited on the quiz show "Jeopardy!" will pay dividends in health care. WellPoint says Watson's ability to process vast amounts of information and analyze the meaning and context of human language can be used to assist physicians and nurses in diagnosis and identifying treatment options.

European Commission and Council of Europe sign Declaration on Multilingualism
2011/09/12

http://ec.europa.eu/languages/news/pdf/joint_declaration_european_day_(...)
Respect for cultural and linguistic diversity and language learning for all are fundamental principles of the Council of Europe and of the European Union. The ability to understand and use several languages helps citizens achieve their full potential, both socially and professionally. Language skills are essential for equity and integration. Against the current backdrop of increasing mobility, globalisation of the economy and changing economic trends, the need to learn languages and develop plurilingual and intercultural education is more obvious than ever before. On 26 September the Council of Europe and the European Commission mark the 10th anniversary of the European Day of Languages. We welcome the joint progress made during the past decade in raising awareness about Europe's rich linguistic heritage, encouraging multilingualism in society and in motivating European citizens to learn more languages.

Alfresco, TEMIS join to enhance Content with Semantic Information
2011/09/09

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-cms/alfresco-temis-join-to-enhan(...)
Open source content management system (CMS) provider Alfresco and Semantic Content Enrichment provider TEMIS have announced an integration that allows semantic metadata to be extracted from content stored in Alfresco.

UMPC and Nuance launch Clinical Language Understanding partnership
2011/09/08

http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/upmc-nuance-launch-clu-partnershi(...)
The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Nuance Communications have partnered to develop NLP solutions altering the way clinical data is captured. The two are looking to extend the presence and functionality of clinical language understanding (CLU)-enabled technologies.

Infomedia and Whitevector partner to provide Social Media Monitoring solutions
2011/09/07

http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/cgi/news/release?id=332026
As social media has shown vast growth during past years, there is a growing need to monitor and analyze the ongoing digital discussions on different platforms. As a result, Infomedia has entered into a partnership with Whitevector, one of the pioneers within the field of social media monitoring and analysis. With the new collaboration, Infomedia's clients will be able to follow and analyze the online conversations that take place in social media.

Lionbridge pushes realtime, customizable MT for Online Chat
2011/09/07

http://informationweek.com/thebrainyard/news/community_tools/231600976(...)
With the Google Translate API no longer free, Lionbridge pushes realtime, customizable machine translation for online chat. Lionbridge Technologies's GeoFluent is a customizable cloud service based on IBM machine translation technology that plugs into online chat systems for customer sales, service, and support, starting with LivePerson. GeoFluent also integrates with IBM's Sametime for enterprise communications. Supported languages include French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.

DollarDays to employ NL conversion power of easyAsk for customer diversion
2011/09/06

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/9/prweb8772612.htm
EasyAsk, a leader in e-commerce search and merchandising software, and DollarDays International, the premiere online wholesaler and closeout company, today announced one of the largest and most diverse uses of e-commerce search in e-retail. DollarDays is using the natural language conversion power of EasyAsk eCommerce Edition to get customers from the home page to the right products in a single click, helping increase purchase rates and revenue. DollarDays distributes over 140,000 products on its e-commerce site with over 5,000 categories and sub-categories – a product catalog that would rival even the largest e-retailers. In addition, as a small business wholesaler, the catalog is continuously shifting as seasons change, new products become available, and excess product needs to be closed out.

Websense named leader for Content-Aware Data Loss Prevention by Gartner
2011/09/05

http://www.indiainfoline.com/Markets/News/Websense-named-leader-for-Co(...)
An increasingly mobile workforce, more social networks, and advanced attacks have made it critical for organizations to quickly deploy effective data theft prevention. That’s why Websense, Inc.developed the TRITON™ solution, which includes the WebsenseData Security Suite. And Gartner, Inc. has positioned Websense as a leader in its recently released “Magic Quadrant for Content-Aware Data Loss Prevention” and published a Websense evaluation in the “Critical Capabilities for Content-Aware Data Loss Prevention” report. Ideal for large or small enterprises, Websense Data Security Suite administrators use it to protect sensitive data and ensure compliance with regulations such as HIPAA, PCI, SOX, EU Directive 95/46/EC, and PIPA. With more than 1,100 built-in templates and rules powered by Websense PreciseID™ natural language processing, and support for hundreds of unique file types, Data Security Suite identifies confidential data traversing the network, servers, databases, laptops, and other locations.