Language Technology News for 2012

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New contents are provided biweekly. Please email any relevant news to feedback@lt-world.org.

Udacity and the future of Online Universities
2012/01/23

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/01/23/udacity-and-the-futur(...)
The most exciting (but also, in a small way, slightly depressing) presentation at DLD this year came from Sebastian Thrun, of Stanford and Google. Or formerly of Stanford, anyway. Thrun told the story of his Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class, which ran from October to December last year. It started as a way of putting his Stanford course online — he was going to teach the whole thing, for free, to anybody in the world who wanted it. With quizzes and grades and a final certificate, in parallel with the in-person course he was giving his Stanford undergrad students. He sent out one email to announce the class, and from that one email there was ultimately an enrollment of 160,000 students. Thrun scrambled to put together a website which could scale and support that enrollment, and succeeded spectacularly well. [...] So what I was expecting was an announcement from Thrun that he was helping to reinvent university education: that he was moving all his Stanford courses online, that the physical class would be a space for students to get more personalized help. No more lecturing: instead, the classes would be taken on the students’ own time, and the job of the real-world professor would be to answer questions from kids paying $30,000 for their education. But that’s not the announcement that Thrun gave. Instead, he said, he concluded that “I can’t teach at Stanford again.” He’s given up his tenure at Stanford, and he’s started a new online university called Udacity.

Creative Virtual Ltd. shortlisted for Econsultancy Innovation Award
2012/01/19

http://econsultancy.com/us/press-releases/6143-creative-virtual-ltd-sh(...)
Recently Creative Virtual Ltd was shortlisted for the Econsultancy Innovation Awards 2012 in the category of ‘Innovation in Customer & User Experience’ for their integration of O2 UK’s virtual agent Ask Lucy with Live Chat from LivePerson via a seamless handover process. Creative Virtual’s finely tuned natural language technology allowed Lucy to answer a wide range of questions with a high degree of accuracy. However, for some more complex questions being posed by O2 customers online, it was determined that the option of Live Chat would provide a more personalised and complete customer service experience. Together O2 and Creative Virtual identified trigger phrases and questions that might require escalation to Live Chat.

Lang Tech News BETA now online!
2012/01/19

http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/language-technologies/news_en.html
Lang Tech News is a new, constantly evolving website, aiming to bring together news and information about Language Technologies in Europe and the world. It covers a wide range of domains and topics including technologies, applications and industries. You can follow them on Twitter too @LangTechNews, or subscribe to the daily newsletter. Registration is not required.

European Commission: New service unlocks project information on CORDIS
2012/01/19

http://cordis.europa.eu/fetch?CALLER=EN_NEWS&ACTION=D&SESSION=&RCN=342(...)
The European Union has some of the world's best research facilities and most accomplished researchers. Harnessing their full potential will help turn novel ideas into jobs, green growth and social progress. To facilitate this, the European Commission finances, either wholly or partially, a wide range of individual research and technology development projects. Details about many of these can be found on the Community Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS) - the primary information source for EU-funded projects. A new Projects Service, launched on 16 January 2012, will enhance the role of CORDIS. Designed not only to be a comprehensive reference point for project participants, coordinators and stakeholders, the service will also make information and data available to wider audiences.

Yahoo Predicts America's Political Winners
2012/01/19

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/39487/?nlid=nldly&nld=2012-01-19
Data scientists at Yahoo are using prediction markets—along with polls, sentiment analysis on Twitter, and trends in search queries—to create the mother of all political prediction engines. The project involves Web-based prediction markets like Intrade, in which large numbers of people bet on the outcomes of elections. The researchers behind this effort, David Rothschild, an economist at Yahoo Research, and Dave Pennock, a computer scientist at Yahoo Research, call their effort the Signal. They plan to produce data visualizations that best convey probability to a lay audience, and to publish work on machine learning and fundamental economic models based on the effort.

Capita Group Plc. acquires Applied Language Solutions for greater market penetration
2012/01/19

http://www.appliedlanguage.com/about_us/news/capita-acquires-translati(...)
Applied Language Solutions, a provider of translation services, has been bought by Capita Group Plc, a provider of business process outsourcing and integrated professional support service solutions. The Capita Group Plc has announced its acquisition of language services provider, Applied Language Solutions Ltd ('ALS'). The business has been bought by Capita for £7.5m, with a further contingent consideration of up to £60m, based on performance over the next four years.

Now Search for Cheapest Flights on Facebook and Twitter via Indian Search Engine iXiGo
2012/01/19

http://www.theopenpress.com/index.php?a=press&id=128727
iXiGO.com, a leading travel search engine in India, is breaking new ground with the launch of a natural language flight search tool for Facebook and Twitter. The tool will allow Facebook and Twitter users to post a flight request on a wall or send a message to a Twitter page and receive the cheapest flight fare and details within minutes.

FP7-ICT CAll 9 is now open!
2012/01/18

http://newsemf.blogspot.com/2012/01/fp7-ict-call-9-is-now-open.html
The new call for proposal has been published today (18/01/2012) with a deadline of 12th of April 2012, at 17:00.00 Brussels local time. The indicative budget is 291 million euros. Several objectives of the following Challenges are open: Challenge 2: Cognitive systems and robotics, Challenge 4: Technologies for Digital Content and Languages, Challenge 5: ICT for Health, Ageing Well, Inclusion and Governance, Challenge 8: ICT for Learning and Access to Cultural Resources, Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) and International cooperation -partnership building and support to dialogues-.

Q&A expertise platform Beepl went live
2012/01/16

http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/8690-q-a-platform-beepl-goes-live-toda(...)
Opening to the public today, the Q&A site allows users to seek answers and opinions from subject specialists, enthusiasts and their social graph. The site's semantic engine uses natural language processing and machine learning to create a real-time network of experts. Questions are re-routed and matched to the most relevant users, as the company says users don’t follow topics - but topics follow them.

Using Crowdsourced Translation to create a Multilingual Newsroom
2012/01/13

http://www.commonsenseadvisory.com/Default.aspx?Contenttype=ArticleDet(...)
As the online digital divide becomes smaller and smaller, language still remains one of the last true barriers to consuming content anywhere, anytime. The Global Voices Lingua Project has found a way to overcome this barrier, and at the same time, build a multilingual newsroom. We interviewed Paula Góes, Multilingual Editor at Global Voices, to find out more. Global Voices is dedicated to spreading the message from all types of citizen media (blogs, podcasts, videos, photos, and so on) from all over the world, with an emphasis on perspectives that generally do not appear in mainstream media sources. Because that content is created in many languages, the organization relies on a crowdsourced project called Lingua. It all started back in 2005 with a Taiwanese blogger named Portnoy Zheng, who supported the Global Voices cause and decided to start translating its English content into Traditional Chinese. The Lingua Project has now evolved into a global network of 500 active volunteers - including translators, editors, revisers, and trainers - who translate into 33 languages from English, and from English into nine languages. The project doesn't only include the mega-languages of the world, but ones like Aymara, Bangla, and Malagasy as well.

Wolfram Alpha Founder wants .Data domains for Computers
2012/01/12

http://www.fellowgeek.com/a-Wolfram-Alpha-Founder-Wants-.Data-Domains-(...)
Steven Wolfram, a mathematician of some note and founder of Wolfram Alpha, wants computers to have their own top level domain. The .Data domain, as Wolfram names it, would let computers communicate with sites designed specifically for other computers, rather than for humans. The web as we know it was designed to be parsed by people. The pretty text, fancy menus and complex AJAX-driven effects that make sites so interesting to our eyes make it hard for computers to pull out data. While we have managed to circumvent that a bit with special files meant to be read by machines, by and large the web is a poisonous place to its most populous member.

VirtuOz says Virtual Agents are “Siri for the Enterprise”
2012/01/12

http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2012/01/12/virtuoz-says-virtual-a(...)
2011 was a very big year for natural language processing (NLP)—the science of teaching computers to communicate with humans in plain English (or French, or Japanese). First IBM’s Watson beat Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Then Apple captivated mobile consumers with the iPhone 4S, which included an enhanced version of Siri, the voice-driven assistant born at Menlo Park, CA-based SRI International. Suddenly, the idea that computers might be just as good as humans at carrying out certain types of requests seemed a lot less far-fetched.

Stimulating growth and employment: an action plan for doubling the volume of e-commerce in Europe 2015
2012/01/11

http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/12/10&forma(...)
The development of electronic commerce and online services offers enormous potential for beneficial economic, social and societal change. The Internet economy creates 2.6 jobs for every "off-line" job lost, and offers a better choice to consumers, including those in rural and isolated areas. The gains brought by lower online prices and a wider choice of available products and services are estimated at EUR 11.7 billion, equivalent to 0.12 % of European GDP. If 15 % of retail sales were e-commerce and the obstacles to the internal market were removed, the gains for consumers might be as much as EUR 204 billion, or 1.7 % of European GDP. The European Commission finds, however, that there are many obstacles preventing consumers and businesses from investing fully in online services: ignorance or uncertainty about the applicable rules, offers that lack transparency and are hard to compare, and payments and modes of delivery that are often expensive and unsuitable.

AI use extends beyond scientific boundaries
2012/01/10

http://www.zdnetasia.com/ai-use-extends-beyond-scientific-boundaries-6(...)
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) today goes beyond scientific industries as it offers benefits of reduced operational costs and human risks, as well as better management of complex data, note industry researchers. However, they also warn that the technology is still relatively new and under developed, and companies need to also consider business ethics and user privacy. Artificial intelligence is currently widely used across several industry segments, Rafael Banchs, a scientist with the human language technology department of Institute of Infocomm Research (I2R), said in an e-mail. He added that there is already some degree of AI in almost every automated system involving sensors and actuators, or moving mechanisms.

On Handling Big Data Variety
2012/01/10

http://www.finextra.com/community/fullblog.aspx?blogID=6129
In my last post, I discussed the challenges, patterns, and approaches to dealing with the most obvious of the “four V’s” of big data – volume – briefly touching on the subject of unstructured data and schema-less repositories. In this installment, I'd like to focus on this topic in a bit more detail, and look at the next aspect of Big Data – variety – from several angles. Variety refers to various degrees of structure (or lack thereof) within the source data. While much attention has been given to loosely-structured Web data, whether sourced from the Web itself (social media, etc.), or from Web server logs, I'd like to turn to the topic of unstructured data within the financial institution’s firewall and focus on the challenge of linking diverse data with various levels of structure, rather than discussing the storage and analysis of unstructured data as a standalone problem.