IBM Technology Translates Arabic Media Broadcasts to English ~ Technology to help us.....

MarketWatch ^ | Sep 14, 2006 Last Update: 9:09 AM ET | Steven Tomasco IBM Media Relations

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Critical Mention, Inc. to Commercialize as Subscription Service for Business, Government and Media

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YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, NY, Sep 14, 2006 (MARKET WIRE via COMTEX) -- IBM

Under the agreement, IBM Research will provide Critical Mention a multi-year license to its speech-to-text translation solution for Arabic and English sources, with the ability to expand to other languages in the future.

"The ever-shifting nature of the market compels business professionals to quickly and easily monitor a wide range of foreign events and world media," said Arthur Ciccolo of IBM Research. "The unique TALES technology, combined with Critical Mention's advanced real-time search and monitoring system, will benefit organizations from all industry segments."

The TALES system combines three core technologies: search, speech-to-text conversion, and statistical machine translation. If a user selects a news source and a particular video clip, for example, the spoken words in this foreign language file are converted into written words. Then, TALES translates the written foreign-language text into the target language, English in this case. To provide the most accurate results, TALES uses statistical machine translation that employs automatically extracted word-to-word and phrase-to-phrase translations as used by the United Nations' simultaneous translators. The statistical model for translation improves TALES effectiveness in capturing the meaning of the news it translates.

Critical Mention is adapting the speech-to-text conversion, and statistical machine translation components to integrate with its existing TV search & monitoring platform, CriticalTV, to provide subscribers with real-time monitoring of Arabic TV.

[FairOpinion]

PING -- thought you'd be interested in this.

[FairOpinion]

This should also help in translating intercepted terrorist conversations.

I keep reading that many of those aren't translated, because they don't have enough translators.

Machine translations are never as good as translations by those speaking the language fluently and familiar with idioms, etc., but it can at least give an idea of what the conversation is about.

[Wormwood]

Now *this* has incredible potential for us in the War on Terror.

Fingers definitely crossed.

[Southack]

Coming to an Internet near you!

Seriously, Dogpile or Yahoo or Google or YouTube should license this technology, give it away to their web visitors for free, and watch as the site that has it gains a distinct advantage over the other search engines and content providers.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I wonder just how good the translation is....JV has been pinged....would like his opinion.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Babbelfish may have a competitor.

[blam]

Good deal.

[jveritas]

Excellent, I hope this will help in the translations of millions of Iraqi documents. I wonder if this software can translate the “handwritten” documents or just the typed ones.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I doubt it does the handwritten but it does speech to text....

[Marine_Uncle]

Interesting. Thanks.