Language Technology News for 2011

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Fusion Garage launches Grid-10 Tablet
2011/08/15

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/fusion-garage-launches-groundb(...)
Fusion Garage today launched the innovative Grid-10 tablet computer while revealing itself as the brand behind TabCo, the parody company that captured industry and consumer attention over the past eight weeks. The Grid-10 is Fusion Garage's second generation tablet and brings a host of new features to the tablet market including a new operating system, a dynamic user interface based on the semantic web that offers "predictive intelligence" and the highest resolution display available.

Speech Recognition technology making its way into EHR systems
2011/08/15

http://searchhealthit.techtarget.com/news/2240039521/Speech-recognitio(...)
Health care providers over the years have raised a number of objections t o electronic health records -- they cost too much, disrupt practices already pressed for time and fail to mesh with the way medical offices work. But there's an even more fundamental digital challenge -- some doctors don't want to busy their fingers on a keyboard. Indeed, manual data entry can be a barrier to EHR acceptance. Physicians may well prefer to document patient encounters in the traditional style, dictating notes and using a transcription service. Against this backdrop, speech recognition technology offers doctors another way to fill out a patient’s electronic chart.

Google buys Motorola mobile phone division
2011/08/15

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/e906bedc-c734-11e0-a9ef-00144feabdc0.ht(...)
Google has made its largest and boldest acquisition yet with the $12.5bn purchase of Motorola’s mobile-phone division, a deal the search company hopes will bolster its Android smartphone system. The acquisition will put Google and Apple head-to-head in the battle for dominance in the fast-growing smartphone market, as both companies will control both the hardware and software of their products.

The origins of the PC, 30 years ago.
2011/08/12

http://www.zdnet.com.au/the-origins-of-the-pc-30-years-ago-pics-339320(...)
On 12 August 1981, IBM rented out a ballroom at the elegant Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York and introduced its landmark 5150 personal computer. That first 5150 — made up of a system unit, a keyboard and colour graphics capability — cost US$1565. Consumers needed to shell out more money for options, such as a display, a printer, diskette drives and extra memory. The 5150 originally weighed 9.5kg without the diskette drives, 12.7kg with two of them. It contained 40 kilobytes of read-only memory and 16 kilobytes of user memory, before adding the diskette drives.

What is holding back the multilingual business?
2011/08/12

http://blogs.forrester.com/tim_walters/11-08-12-that_is_totally_me_sau(...)
It’s hard to avoid the tired old metaphors of “explosion” and “flood” when speaking of the exponential expansion of internet and other digital content. Consider this startling factoid: According to Google’s recent Think Quarterly on innovation, “In 2003, five exabytes of information existed. Now we generate that every two days.” Three key factors drive the spike in inquiries Forrester has seen this year about translation technologies, practices, and service providers. The first is this inundation of content. Even if only a tiny percentage of it could be valuable in other languages, it overwhelms the capacity of human translators.

The “Un-cancelling” of the EC Translation Technology Tender
2011/08/11

http://www.commonsenseadvisory.com/Default.aspx?Contenttype=ArticleDet(...)
In 2010, the European Commission (EC) opened a tender for bids on computer-assisted translation (CAT) and translation memory (TM) tools to which a number of well-known industry firms responded. In July 2011, a “Corrigendum” was issued declaring the awarding procedure unsuccessful. The reason given? “None of the submitted tenders met the minimum quality criteria.” Understandably, the companies that invested time and cost in responding to the tender expressed disappointment. This week, a modification to the Corrigendum was issued.

Father Busa, pioneer of computing in humanities with Index Thomisticus, dies at 98
2011/08/11

http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertobonzio/2011/08/11/father-busa-pione(...)
In 1946, when computers were few enormous machines, oddly slow for today’s standards, and Internet wasn’t even an idea, a young Italian Jesuit priest planned to use machines and language elaboration for a titanic enterprise: organizing immense work of Saint Thomas Aquinas.

Uniting a World of Employees
2011/08/11

http://www.technologyreview.com/business/38181/?nlid=nldly&nld=2011-08(...)
With more than 130,000 employees worldwide—in cities including Hong Kong, Zurich, Beijing, Atlanta, and Bangalore, where its world headquarters is located—the Indian IT and outsourcing giant Infosys has a particular need to keep everyone connected. So Infosys decided, earlier this year, not only to sell but also to internally use a corporate social-networking platform, iEngage. With this, it joins a fast-growing trend toward putting social media to work.

ABBYY introduces Lingvo x5 dictionary to simplify Multilingual Communication
2011/08/10

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/abbyy-introduces-lingvo-x5-dic(...)
New Version Combines Premium Multilingual Content with Intelligent Word Look-Up; Provides Online Access to Purchased Dictionaries and Other Language Services

Question Answering featured high impact trend by Gartner's 2011 Hype Cycle Special Report
2011/08/10

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/gartners-2011-hype-cycle-special-repo(...)
Activity streams, wireless power, Internet TV, NFC payment and private cloud computing are some of the technologies that have moved into the Peak of Inflated Expectations, according to the 2011 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle by Gartner, Inc. Other newly featured high-impact trends include big data, and natural language question answering.

Top European corporate R&D investors set to increase innovation efforts by 5% a year
2011/08/10

http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/11/957&form(...)
Top R&D investing companies based in the EU expect their global research and development (R&D) investments to grow by 5% annually from 2011 to 2013. This is more than double last year's expectations, and represents a significant upturn from the 2.6% R&D cuts in investment implemented by these companies in 2009. The companies surveyed also revealed that an average of 27% of their annual sales comes from innovative products introduced in the past three years, demonstrating again that innovation is the key to commercial success and to job creation. These figures were published today by the European Commission in its sixth EU Survey on R&D Investment Business Trends, a survey of the R&D investment expectations of the 1000 European companies which invest most in R&D. 205 companies responded, providing a substantial sample.

Submissions wanted for Novay Digital Identity Award 2011
2011/08/09

http://www.identitynext.eu/award.php
At IDentity.Next'11, the Novay Identity Award will be granted to the best new concept or product concerning digital identity. With this award, Identity.Next and ICT research institute Novay want to recognize and support new developments and innovations that are shaping the future of digital identity

Facebook using natural language processing to group posts, link to pages
2011/08/08

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-using-natural-language-pro(...)
Facebook is using natural language processing to group posts in your News Feed, and link to a Page relevant to the topic that is being discussed. Facebook has added a new type of story to its News Feed today: if more than one of your friends post about the same topic, and it has a Page on the social network, the posts will be grouped under a Posted About story, even if your friends don’t explicitly tag the Page. The story is posted in the following format: “[Friend] and [x] other friends posted about [Page]” where the last part is a link to the Page in question.

SAIC throws down the gauntlet
2011/08/08

http://www.commonsenseadvisory.com/Default.aspx?Contenttype=ArticleDet(...)
Sawaf said that SAIC’s approach fully integrates rules, statistics, and semantics in the core engine. This approach allows the engine to generate translations based on both full sentences and on phrases or sentence fragments, something that other engines can’t do. He also said that AppTek-developed functional classes allow SAIC to tag linguistic tokens with up to 1,200 attributes, thus providing a semantic nuance not found in other hybrid engines. The HMT engine labels each sub-unit of a sentence at multiple levels, for rules, statistics, and semantic parsing – each of these elements feeds the hypothetic translation.

Debt deal could threaten U.S. R&D spending
2011/08/05

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/38240/?nlid=nldly&nld=2011-08-0(...)
Experts worry that the legislation to cut the federal debt could hurt investments in research and infrastructure. The spending limits that Congress agreed to this week as part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling could hurt U.S. spending on R&D and infrastructure. Some experts say such spending is essential for the country to remain competitive globally. The budget deal sets spending caps that will reduce spending by $1 trillion over the next decade, and it sets up a committee that will attempt to find an additional $1.5 trillion in reductions. The spending limit for the 2012 fiscal year, which starts in October, would reduce discretionary spending by $7 billion compared to last year, and by $73 billion compared to what President Obama asked for in his budget.