IBM Pushing Its Translation Technology
October 29, 2010
Years ago I remember hearing a talk by then-search guru Arthur Ciccolo, IBM Research. My recollection is fuzzy, but he was talking about IBM’s interest in shifting from key word search to concept searching. I lost track of the fellow until I read “IBM Licenses Arabic Translation Tool to Online Media Firm.” IBM’s search solution is to rely on open source technology and to turn some of its wizards loose in a hunt for – you guessed it – concept searching technology. IBM is an interesting and very large company, so unrequited dreams and marketing assertions don’t have to become reality.
Mr. Ciccolo has shifted to a field adjacent to search, voice recognition. Hard on the heels of licensing the IBM TALES Arabic to English system to Critical Mention, Mr. Ciccolo is alleged to have said:
“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.”
TALES is shorthand for Translingual Automation Language Exploitation System. I like “exploitation”. The write up continued:
TALES combines search, speech-to-text conversion and machine translation technologies. Spoken words are converted into written words, then translated into the target language. To provide the most accurate results, the system uses statistical machine translation that employs automatically extracted word-to-word and phrase-to-phrase translations.
I have noticed an uptick in interest in real time translation systems. We have been relying on Google’s plumbing, which—so far—is free. Oh, and IBM’s concept searching. Still in the pipeline I suppose.
Stephen E Arnold, October 29, 2010
Freebie
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