Date: Oct 22, 2003 Source: In-Q-Tel (
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Language Weaver, an emerging software company developing statistical machine translation software (SMTS), today announced a strategic investment and development contract from In-Q-Tel, Inc., the private venture group funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Language Weaver, founded in 2002 by three University of Southern California (USC) researchers and funded by a group of angel investors, is commercializing a statistical method of automatic language translation and natural language processing. Using a statistical rather than traditional rules-based approach, this advanced technology correlates words and word groupings from language to language to produce the highest probability output.
The company is currently launching its first translation products into the commercial marketplace. The globalization of business, including the use of the Internet to dispense company information and provide a forum for customers, has created a critical need for translation systems that facilitate global commerce, such as Language Weaver's SMTS system. The first products being released are sold as licensed software modules for various language pairs.
A strategic investor and customer, In-Q-Tel is helping to underwrite the development of additional language translation modules that will be released later this year. In-Q-Tel's investment portfolio includes companies developing technologies to help large organizations more quickly and efficiently process massive volumes of data. Translation software is a necessary piece of the solution for global corporations, as well as for national security and defense applications.
According to Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, "Language Weaver's methodology for machine translation is very promising. Although machine translation has been around for some time, output has improved slowly and only incrementally. We think that this technology could transform the industry and expand the utilization of machine translation as a tool to support global commerce and homeland security."
Bryce Benjamin, CEO of Language Weaver, states, "In early product testing, our SMTS system is producing the highest quality of output for gisting that we have seen by machine translation to date, and is approaching the typical human to human translation scores when trained on domain-specific documents. Investment from In-Q-Tel not only validates our scientifically-grounded technology, it also helps us refine the system further to meet the security challenges facing us today as well as to support global enterprise."
About Language Weaver
Language Weaver was founded in 2002 to commercialize a unique approach to automatic language translation using proprietary statistical translation technology that resulted from 20 person-years of invention and development at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute (USC/ISI). Its first round of funding included investment from the TechCoastAngels, Athenaeum Fund and Sulphur Creek Ventures. The company has 19 patents pending on its SMTS technology. For more information, visit the company's Web site at www.languageweaver.com.
