Tag: NaturalLanguage

QTranslate, Versatile Desktop Translator For Windows
Often your only option to make sense of the text is to use a machine translation service like Google Translate or Microsoft Translate. QTranslate registers several global hotkeys that let you translate text from any open program window. The two most important hotkeys are Ctrl-q, which displays a translation of the highlighted text in a popup window, or Ctrl-Ctrl which sends the highlighted text to the program window where it is then translated. The keyboard shortcut Ctrl-e furthermore uses text to speech synthesis to read the text out loud. (more)

JPO and the EPO agree on cooperation in the field of machine translation
See also6 February 2012 In a landmark step towards increased use of worldwide patent information on the internet, the Commissioner of the Japan Patent Office (JPO), Yoshiyuki Iwai, and the President of the European Patent Office (EPO), Benot Battistelli, have signed an agreement which will provide users of the patent system with better machine translations of patents from Japanese into English and then into German and French. In other words, the patent documents are very important not only for patent offices and applicants but also the public in the world and can contribute to global development of industry and economics. The significance of patent information has grown steadily with the creation of a global technology market reflected in a new record of 1.8 million patent filings worldwide in 2010. (more)

Evi, The New Girl in Town, Has All the Answers
CAMBRIDGE, United Kingdom, Feb 07, 2012 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Evi, a next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) now being launched via her own "conversational search" mobile app, has skyrocketed to the top of iOS and Android app popularity. Evi is an artificial intelligence that uses natural language processing and semantic search technology to infer the intent of your question, gather information from multiple sources, analyze them and return the most pertinent answer. As Evi's "father", AI entrepreneur Tunstall-Pedoe has designed Evi to draw upon what is now approaching one billion facts contained in the True Knowledge database. In addition to the database, Evi's pool of knowledge is extended through connections with popular APIs, such as Yelp.com, which will soon empower Evi to take immediate action related to your questions. (more)

Allscripts Broadens Speech Recognition Choices In EHRs
Allscripts has entered into a reseller and development agreement with M*Modal Inc., which calls for the integration of M*Modal's speech and language understanding technology into Allscripts' acute and ambulatory electronic health records (EHRs). M*Modal's technology, based on its Speech Understanding and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) platform, will help clinicians create voice-driven narrative patient documentation in Allscripts' EHRs. Michelson said adding M*Modal's technology will help Allscripts gain a competitive advantage over other EHR technologies on the market that don't incorporate speech recognition technology. M*Modal also recently announced a strategic agreement with Merge Healthcare to integrate its speech- and language-understanding technology across Merge's portfolio including its imaging and radiology offerings. (more)

Speech recognition trial uses DS consoles to help children with hearing ...
Speech recognition trial uses DS consoles to help children with hearingdifficulties Nintendo is helping to implement the use of speech recognition software in Japanese schools, in partnership with telecom company NTT. As part a project currently being trialed, speech can be captured from a classroom teacher, and relayed as text on a students DS handheld console. Nintendos handheld console is no stranger to classrooms in Japan, with it already being used in educational settings for a variety of purposes. You can follow him on Twitter @midnightambler VentureBeat's Games channel covers stories about the evolving video game industry, from disruptive social game companies such as Zynga and CrowdStar, to the established giants such as Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard, Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo....... (more)

iTranslate4.eu: the Removal of Language Barrier Marks a New Milestone
The Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS) coordinated the development of the platform, which provides high quality translations even in the less-frequent language pairs, and offers up to five alternatives in the frequent ones. The primary aim of the project is to provide the best available machine translations among the languages of the EU. The website enables users to translate emails texts and websites and even carry out live chatting in all the official European languages and many more. These translations of course do not equal human translations, but they assist understanding among people and languages with an increasing efficiency. (more)

Nuance Buys Transcription And Speech Editing Company Transcend For $300M In Cash
Learn More Nuance has just announced that it is acquiring Transcend, a company that provides medical transcription and speech editing services, for approximately $300 million in cash, or $29.50 per Transcend share. Transcend utilizes a combination of its proprietary Internet-based voice and data distribution technology, customer based technology, and home-based medical language specialists to convert physicians voice recordings into electronic documents. The companys solutions are used every day by people and businesses for tasks and services, such as requesting account information from a phone-based self-service solution, dictating records, searching the mobile Web by voice, entering a destination into a navigation system, or working with PDF documents. (more)

Software Translates Your Voice into Another Language
Researchers at Microsoft have made software that can learn the sound of your voice, and then use it to speak a language that you don't. In a demonstration at Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, campus on Tuesday, Microsoft research scientist Frank Soong showed how his software could read out text in Spanish using the voice of his boss, Rick Rashid, who leads Microsoft's research efforts. Hear Rick Rashid's voice in his native language and then translated into several other languages: In English, a synthetic version of Mundie's voice welcomed the audience to an open day held by Microsoft Research, concluding, "With the help of this system, now I can speak Mandarin. " Individual sounds used by the first model to build up words using a person's voice in his or her own language are carefully tweaked to give the new text-to-speech model a full ability to sound out phrases in the second language. (more)

New Computers Respond To Emotions, Boredom
Emotion-sensing computer software that models and responds to students cognitive and emotional states including frustration and boredom has been developed by University of Notre Dame Assistant Professor of Psychology Sidney DMello and colleagues from the University of Memphis and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. AutoTutor and Affective AutoTutor can gauge the students level of knowledge by asking probing questions, analyzing the students responses to those questions; and even sensing a students frustration or boredom through facial expression and body posture and dynamically changing its strategies to help the student conquer those negative emotions. AutoTutor is an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) that helps students learn complex technical content in Newtonian physics, computer literacy, and critical thinking by holding a conversation in natural language; using its student model to dynamically tailor the interaction to individual students; (more)

Bing Translation Learns Hmong Language
Microsoft has added Hmong to the list of languages supported by Bing Translator. This was achieved using new features of Microsoft Translator to train a new translation engine using parallel documents. The Hmong community, which was instrumental in getting this language added to Bing, is concerned with the long-term preservation of the language and sees an important role for online machine translation in this context. Deploying a system that reaches a certain level of quality allows seamless use with the standard Microsoft Translator APIs, and many scenarios powered by the API, like the web translation widget. (more)

Natural Language Processing Takes Center Stage In EHRs
All of these companies are applying voice recognition coupled with NLP to their ambulatory-care EHRs, and Allscripts is doing the same with its Sunrise acute-care products, including Sunrise Mobile MD II. ) The company has already integrated M*Modal's NLP software into its Sunrise EHR, and the two companies are developing the application on the ambulatory care side. Vern Davenport, chairman and CEO of M*Modal, told InformationWeek Healthcare that his company's product can convert voice to text and do "context enablement" to create discrete data elements that go into EHR templates. (Because of the limitations of iPad keyboards, NLP will be needed to aid this process. (more)

Building the Team That Built Watson
Most scientists I approached favored their own individual projects and career tracks. Scientists, by their nature, can be solitary creatures conditioned to work and publish independently to build their reputations. I remember asking some researchers how long they had been working in natural language processing the field of computer science focused on getting computers to interact in ordinary human language. We eventually pulled together a core group of 12 talented scientists, which over time grew to 25 members. (more)

Dr. Mac: Speech recognition getting better and better
A big improvement Take, for example, Siri on the iPhone 4S. Poor man's Siri The bad news is that Siri, which is still in beta, by the way, is only available on the iPhone 4S. The good news for other iPhone users is that the Dragon Dictation app I mentioned last week, plus the Dragon Go app, which are both free, are the poor man's Siri. This dynamic duo from Dragon isn't as smart Siri (yet), but if your iPhone is older, it's a winning combination. (more)

AskTheDoctor and NIH partner for AI medical research
NIH to tap AskTheDoctor's 200k natural language medical questions for new AI research (Correction: To reflect that IBM's Watson computer is not currently involved in the research project) The National Library of Health (NLH) and online medical advice site AskTheDoctor.com have announced their partnership in a new research initiative, for a new generation of artificial intelligence engine. And AskTheDoctor.com, a site the entire purpose of which is to answer user medical questions in natural language, has provided the researchers with thousands of those kinds of medical questions. NIH Deputy Director, Dr. Milton Corn led the production of both these online medical libraries, and it was he who approached AskTheDoctor.com, recognizing the importance of artifical intelligence and natural language response to the next generation of medical research databases. (more)

Siri, a voice-recognition iPhone application, introduces a new way to interact ...
There's something about Siri - the new, smart-talking celebrity of the virtual world - that could be changing the way we interact with computers forever. Siri is a speech-recognition application installed on the new iPhone 4S that answers questions with a human-like voice and a seemingly human emotional intelligence and sense of humor. In short, Siri is changing everyday computer usage into a relationship most people can enjoy, said Chris Harrison, a doctoral student at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and editor-in-chief of "XRDS," a student magazine for an educational and scientific computing society called ACM. Not only is it a useful, everyday application, but Siri also has a manner and a way about it that people can relate to. (more)

Nuance Aims iPhone Siri-Type Speech At TVs, Cars
You may update your e IBD preferences at any time by going into My IBD and selecting Update Your e IBD Preferences. Ricci says much improved voice recognition technology is on the way soon, though he says it's too early to throw away those computer keyboards and TV remotes. In an interview with IBD, Ricci talks about the potential of speech recognition in living rooms, cars, health care and social media applications. IBD: How long until voice commands or voice recognition technology become ubiquitous in smart phones, TVs and other products? (more)

It's Time to Start 3D Scanning the World
When Microsoft was developing its Kinect 3D sensor, a critical task was to calibrate its algorithms to rapidly and accurately recognize parts of the human body, especially hands, to make sure the device would work in any home, with any age group, any clothing, and any kind of background object. Using a computer-based approach to do the calibration had limitations, because computers would sometimes fail to identify a human hand in a Kinect-generated image, or would see a hand where none existed. Imagine if a robot could promptly recognize any object in a home or office or factory: Anything that the robot sees or picks up it would instantly know what it is. This type of data collection presents a chicken-and-egg problem: If you have a data set with objects properly tagged, you can start to build applications that rely on the knowledge stored in that set, and these applications in turn can generate more data and you can refine the knowledge further. (more)

Ask Ziggy for Windows Phone to Rival Apple's Siri
Ask Ziggy for Windows Phone to Rival Apples Siri An independent Windows Phone developer has created an app for Microsofts mobile platform that will attempt to outmatch Apples intelligent voice-controlled assistant Siri. Ask Ziggy uses Speech Recognition to translate human speech into transcribed text, which is displayed in a speech bubble. The Nuance-based voice recognition part of the software allows Ask Ziggy to translate speech to text and just like Apples Siri, the Windows Phone app can accept queries, solve math problems, perform other tasks, and talk back to the user. Ask Ziggy is still under development as Leib plans to add multilingual support, language translations and expand speech grammar before submitting the app to the Windows Marketplace. (more)

Computerized language translation started 58 years ago with IBM and Georgetown ...
Hard to imagine but it has been 58 years since IBM and Georgetown University teamed up to run what they said was at the time the first English-to-Russian language computer translation program. "Although IBM emphasized that it is not yet possible 'to insert a Russian book at one end and come out with an English book at the other,' [IBM] predicted that 'five, perhaps three years hence, interlingual meaning conversion by electronic process in important functional areas of several languages may well be an accomplished fact. '" Interestingly, that sort of programming translation, while a hot topic during this period of time, proved difficult, expensive and ultimately controversial. The 1966 ALPAC report, " Language and Machines: Computers in Translation and Linguistics ," according to a Wikipedia entry, "was highly critical of the existing efforts, demonstrating that the systems were no faster than human translations, while also demonstrating that the supposed lack of translators was in fact a surplus, and as a result of supply and demand issues, human translation was relatively inexpensive -- about $6 per 1,000 words. (more)

Start-up hopes to help UAE businesses lost in translation
Some of the Qordoba innovations can now be integrated into a client's office for easier translation in-house, although the company's goal was to create a suite of solutions. "That way, no matter who is working on your translation - it could be a translator in the UK, an editor sitting in Damascus or someone in Dubai - they're going to see the client's style preference," says May Habib, the founder and chief executive of Qordoba. Globally, the sales of language translation software reached US$575.5 million (Dh2.11 billion) in 2010 and is forecast to grow to $3bn within the next five years, according to market data released last year by WinterGreen Research. Qordoba has taken a high-tech approach with some its translation features, although it relies on an online network of more than 400 human translators and editors in about 30 countries and 15 time zones. (more)

On Text Analytics vs Machine Translation
About Ken Hu: Thinkudo Labs Currently, Ken is founding the text mining company Thinkudo Labs. Personally, I would claim that Text Analytics covers topics which extract and normalize text into measurable data. Instead of extracting information from the text, it transforms the text into another form. This may lead to misinterpretation that English text is a requirement for Text Analytics problems.However, that is just not true. (more)

AT&T Spills Details Of New Watson Speech Recognition App Platform
In June, we plan to launch several AT&T Watson SM Speech application programming interfaces (APIs) that developers can access to quickly create great new apps and services with voice recognition and transcription capabilities, wrote John Donovan, an AT&T senior VP of technology and network operations, in a blog post. Watson, which was developed by AT&T Labs, the telecom giants research arm, is already live in its automated customer service phone banks and AT&T Translator and Yellow Pages mobile ( YPMobile ) iPhone apps. Following AT&Ts announcement, some key questions remained, such as: How much the program will cost developers, whether AT&T will take a cut of sales, and just which specific languages the technology will support. Regarding the cost, there is a registration charge of $99, which will allow developers to use all AT&T APIs, including speech, without a per transaction charge through 2012, AT&Ts spokesperson told TPM. (more)

Breaking down the language barriersix years in
It used what was then state-of-the-art commercial machine translation (MT), but the translation quality wasnt very good, and it didnt improve much in those first few years. In 2003, a few Google engineers decided to ramp up the translation quality and tackle more languages. I joined Google, and we started to retool our translation system toward competing in the NIST Machine Translation Evaluation, a bake-off among research institutions and companies to build better machine translation. We announced our statistical MT approach on April 28, 2006, and in the six years since then weve focused primarily on core translation quality and language coverage. (more)

ABC Language Solutions Launches Social Media Translation Service for ...
Learn how translation and localization of your company's social media profile can increase profits and the ROI of your marketing efforts. Even the best automatic translation systems have difficulty accurately translating the context in which language is used and generally machine translation does not deal well with slang and the sort of abbreviations or text-speak often used in social media. CEO Andrey Bondarenko said the following about this new social media service: "Although machine translation can be good to get a basic understanding of what is being said in another language it is inadequate for the marketing needs of companies doing business globally. Although a business would not need this social media service for every Tweet or Facebook comment they post the service is ideal to help identify the right social platforms, set up the right services in the target language and build an accurate company profile to create long-term relationships and increase trust in a company's products and services in the countries where they do business. (more)

What it takes to build great machine learning products
Machine learning (ML) is all the rage, riding tight on the coattails of the "big data" wave. The challenge in building great products with ML lies not in just understanding basic ML theory, but in understanding the domain and problem sufficiently to operationalize intuitions into model design. Progress in important ML application areas, like NLP, come from insights specific to these problems, rather than generic ML machinery. The goal of this essay is not to discourage people from building amazing products with ML at their cores, but to be clear about where I think the difficulty lies. (more)

Voice Recognition Saves The Day!
The ability to type has become somewhat paramount in our digital world, and for those who spend their days in front of a computer, being able to use both hands on the keyboard is practically a necessity. The hunt and peck method of typing has never worked for me, and perhaps because I spent so much time in front of my keyboard I can envision the QWERTY layout when I close my eyes. While many students taking their first typing class may bemoan the layout, I am one who says kudos to Christopher Latham Sholes the newspaperman who came up with the idea of a multi-row keyboard. I am now continuing to do my job as a writer, both by typing one-handed and with the help of voice recognition software. (more)

Scribe Healthcare Interactive Includes Customizable Cloud Features for Greater ...
Healthcare Technology Featured Article Scribe Healthcare Technologies Inc. Since physicians and healthcare personnel need to be adaptable to cost efficient ways of practicing healthcare, Scribe Interactive is one tool that can immediately generate transcription layout from a dictation. With Scribe Interactive, the built in Scribes M*Modals Speech Recognition Engine leverages existing voice profiles to accomplish this. Even without a recognized voice profile, Scribe Interactive allows users to create verbal snippets for efficiency. (more)

Can Automated Deep Natural-language Analysis...
13:43 GMT, May 4, 2012 Program to assist warfighters with planning and decision-making by inferring implicit information in text, filtering redundancy and connecting like documents Making sense of large amounts of data is a challenge for military operations officers and intelligence analysts whose window for processing that data is often small. In reviewing captured documents, intelligence reports, news articles and related information, conservative estimates indicate that these personnel are unable to explore as much as 90% of the information available to them due to mission, time and resource constraints. Automated, deep natural-language understanding technology may hold a solution for more efficiently processing text information. If successful, DEFT will allow analysts to move from limited, linear processing of insurmountable quantities of data to a nuanced, strategic exploration of available information. (more)

TCS Associates Expands Speech Recognition Solutions for Disabled To Include ...
TCS Associates has a solid and successful history of providing voice recognition products and services to persons with disabilities, so it seemed a natural move to offer those same cutting edge technologies to medical professionals through products like Dragon Medical Practice Edition. TCS Associates is now helping physicians (in addition to lawyers, social workers and other professionals) and medical practices realize the significant time and cost savings of transitioning from manual to voice entry of data with the use of Dragon Medical Practice Edition. Dragon Medical Practice Edition is a powerful and configurable voice recognition solution for small practices with 24 physicians or less, and greatly facilitates the entry of patient notes, coding or prescription information into a practices Electronic Health Record (EHR) software. For medical practices that already have an Electronic Health Record system in place, TCS supports the integration and customization of programs such as Dragon Medical Practice Edition into their existing office IT infrastructure. (more)

What the Voice-Recognition Industry Needs Most
I'm a big believer that voice-recognition technology will play an increasingly prominent role in how we interact with technology -- so much that I've made a bet on Nuance Communications ( NAS: NUAN ) accordingly as the clear technological leader in the field. Datria is a small private player with about 50 employees, and it resells Nuance's speech engine while also counting software giant SAP ( NYS: SAP ) as an investor. That being said, Datria uses a plug-and-play model, so it could theoretically swap out the engine if needed, but Datria has been reselling Nuance's engine for 14 years. Many of those companies license Nuance's engine, and the recognition side works great, but if the application (which is frequently built in-house) isn't programmed to interpret all the ways you can say "yes," then it might not realize that "absolutely" means the same thing. (more)

Smarter Voice Capabilities Will Transform Medical Documentation
In simple terms, that's one on the dilemmas that persist when clinicians interact with clinical information systems. Most provider organizations are familiar with Nuance's Dragon Medical, for instance, which lets clinicians dictate their notes directly into an EHR instead of sending them to first be transcribed into text. The major problem with this approach has been that it provides a huge repository of free text narrative that can't populate all the structured components of a hospital's clinical information system, leaving a potential treasure chest of valuable insights and facts in limbo. According to Chris Spring, MModal's VP of health IT, the platform "listens" to a clinician's dictation in real time and tells her if she's missing any vital information already in the patient's chart. (more)

Future of voice recognition: Assistants that learn from you
Voice-activated assistants are playing an increasingly prominent role in the technology world, with Apple's introduction of Siri for the iPhone 4S and Google's ( rumored ) work on a Siri competitor for Android phones. Siri is taking steps toward providing a natural, conversation-like experience with voice-activated assistants, as Jacqui Cheng noted in the Ars iPhone 4S review. "When given direct and clear tasks, Siri performs well, and it's nice not having to memorize a strict list of commands," Cheng wrote. "The best part about Siri is the fact that you can (or should be able to, anyway) speak to it like you would speak to a person without having to conform to a special speaking syntaxthe number one turn-off for 'regular' people using voice control features. (more)

Argentine company developing leading machine translator
Just when Argentina devalued its peso, New Zealander Charles Campbell and a group of local language teachers didnt hesitate in leaving their academies behind to begin a translation serviceand their bet paid off. Brizuela hopes to have the machine begin performing English to Spanish and Spanish to English translation this year as that is 85% of TBOs business. For the last five years, as there has been a great increase in processing availability, statistical learning has become a reality in the market with work being reduced by months on top of using smaller groups, said Laura Alonso Alemany, a linguist with the Natural Language Processing Group at the National University of Cordoba which supported TBO. The brains behind TBOs machines is Moses, a GPLed translation platform supported by a number of universities and organizations including MIT, Edinburg and DARPA, among others. (more)

We need to talk about speech recognition
Look under the skin of the Siri software and you will find that the speech recognition is provided by industry stalwart Nuance Communications. I've just tried it on my Windows 7 machine and it was quite fun, except for having to spell out and correct Nuance and Google spelling, then sorting out capitalisation, and now I've given up already, back to typing! Controlling some functions of your 2012 Ford Explorer by voice I think Siri has shown us that the voice-recognition technology isn't the most important thing here but the application software layer that the users go through to use the speech recognition. But the application built to use the Nuance speech recognition isn't programmed to interpret all the ways you might say, for example, "No, thank you". (more)

DARPA grant to support research into auto-translation of Chinese
While emerging technologies such as Google Translate have shown promise, much work must be done to improve the language translation applications that America will need as one of its most important 21st century relationships develops. To move the technology forward, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded a $13.7 million grant, called Linguistic Resources for Multilingual, Genre-Independent Language Technologies via its Broad Operational Language Translation (BOLT) Program to the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania to develop linguistic resources. Xue has been involved in this research program for years, beginning with Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization (TIDES) then Global Autonomous Language Exploitation ( GALE ), a five-year program that he worked on while at the University of Colorado. According to DARPA, BOLT is part of a broader effort to provide language translation in support of defense and national security requirements, ranging from phrase translation to scanning and translation of large data sets...... (more)

What Will Siri's Kids be Like? Chatty and Much Smarter
Siri may be able to tell you the capital of Kazakhstan and show you the citys weather forecast -- but her descendents will be able to book the flight that gets you there. Virtual assistant robots -- like Apples ( AAPL ) Siri, GoArmy.coms Sergeant Star or Jenn on alaskaair.com -- may soon be able to recognize and retain the tastes and preferences of users and extract context from conversations, emulating more of a two-sided dialogue. Siri may not be the first with this type of technology, but Apple raised peoples attention to artificial intelligence last year when it integrated Siri into the iPhone 4S. IBM ( IBM ) supercomputer Wilson, who beat former Jeopardy champions on live television last year, also contributed to the growing interest. (more)

The Human Voice, as Game Changer
Here, Mr. Sejnoha, the companys chief technology officer, and other executives are plotting a voice-enabled future where human speech brings responses from not only smartphones and televisions, cars and computers, but also coffee makers, refrigerators, thermostats, alarm systems and other smart devices and appliances. Today, voice technology is a fixture of many companies customer-service operations, albeit an occasionally maddening one. But now the race is on to make the voice the sought-after new interface between us and our technology. No player is bigger in voice technology than Nuance, of Burlington, Mass., an industry pioneer that has acquired more than 40 companies in the field and today employs 7,300 people. (more)

The Rise of Artificial Intelligence Personal Assistant
There's a rising number of impressive AI assistants that are beginning to be able to truly help us deal with tasks like managing diaries, booking restaurants or taxis, and even helping us writing our latest blog posts. And some, like Guile 3D Studio and Creative Virtual, are even managing to generate revenue. Guile 3D Studio is a Brazilian company founded in 2001 by Guile Lindroth, a system analyst, artificial intelligence specialist and 3D graphic artist. The result is an amazing AI assistant called Denise. (more)

Advancements in Speech Recognition Set to Improve IVR
Advancements in Speech Recognition Set to Improve IVR As much as we like automated systems, we also like to use voice to move through steps and complete interactions. This recent Plum Voice blog focused on the advancements in IVR , thanks to improvements in speech recognition. Increases in computer processing speeds have enabled speech recognition developers to create more natural, accurate speech recognition software. Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMCnet and has also written for eastbiz.com. (more)

Why IBM Still Matters
Why IBM Still Matters Share this page WellPoint Inc. ( WLP ), one of the top U.S. health benefit providers, recently announced that it wants to use IBMs Watson system for patient diagnostics, a new milestone in patient healthcare. IBM ( IBM ) developed Watson over the past four years and named it for the company founder, Thomas Watson. Witness the latest big experiment in the healthcare industry's use of technology to make recommendations on patient care and diagnostics, courtesy of IBM. Doctors will be able to access the Watson application on a computer or hand-held device before, during or after visits. (more)

Searching for New Ideas
Web Searching for New Ideas If anyone can preview the future of computing, it should be Alfred Spector , Google's director of research. Spector's team focuses on the most challenging areas of computer science research with the intention of shaping Google's future technology. Another example is Fusion Tables , which is now part of Google Docs [the company's online office suite]. [During the recent hurricane Irene, New York public radio station WNYC used Fusion Tables to create an interactive guide to evacuation zones in the city. (more)

Speaking 'robots' can teach English 24-hours a day
2011 YouTube, LLC A Japanese company has developed the world's first artificial intelligence "chat robots" to teach English. SpeakGlobal's online 'robots' - which appear as male or female manga-style characters - look and make gestures that are identical to that of a human, speak aloud and can hold an interactive conversation with the student. Developed primarily for the domestic market for people who want to learn to speak English, the technology can be adapted for any language around the world - although humans in the teaching profession may be less than delighted at the prospect. Access to one of the teacher robots starts at $15 per month, instead of the more usual fee of $300 a month for time with a human teacher at a private school. (more)

Speech Recognition Leaps Forward
Speech Recognition Leaps Forward During Interspeech 2011 , the 12th annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association being held in Florence, Italy, from Aug. 28 to 31, researchers from Microsoft Research will present work that dramatically improves the potential of real-time, speaker-independent, automatic speech recognition. Dong Yu , researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond , and Frank Seide , senior researcher and research manager with Microsoft Research Asia , have been spearheading this work, and their teams have collaborated on what has developed into a research breakthrough in the use of artificial neural networks for large-vocabulary speech recognition. The notion of using ANNs to improve speech-recognition performance has been around since the 1980s, and a model known as the ANN-Hidden Markov Model (ANN-HMM) showed promise for large-vocabulary speech recognition. The new project applied CD-DNN-HMM models to speech-to-text transcription and was tested against Switchboard, a highly challenging phone-call transcription benchmark recognized by the speech-recognition research community. (more)

Google Translate in the Office
Business Google Translate in the Office The potential usefulness of automatic computerized translation was recognized by the very first AI researchers in the 1950s. The poster child for computer translation is Google Translate, the easy-to-use, general purpose Web-based translation engine that can handle nearly 60 languages. " In part because of Google Translate's growing popularity, the office of the future is getting a verb of the future: "gist. Whilst it's a fascinating area of research, MT is still highly experimental and only suited to certain narrow purposes. (more)

Diffbot Sees The Web Like People Do, Now Free For Developers
Today, Diffbot is releasing its first set of APIs, now open to all developers for free. The launch has the potential to dramatically impact the types of applications developers can build, and for consumers, it means a whole host of intelligent applications are about to emerge. The New APIs: On-Demand & Follow With the two APIs available now, developers can build apps that automatically extract meaning from pages, apps that understand whats trending and whos talking about it, apps that provide RSS feeds where none were available before and apps that read just the relevant parts of webpages aloud, ignoring ads, header and footer copy. Or FeedBeater , which makes it easy to turn any URL into an RSS feed automatically ( one of Diffbots first creations ). (more)

Formspring open to bullying, says anti-bullying charity
Anti-bullying charities say they are worried about anonymous messaging facilities on the social networking site Formspring. Natalie is 15 and is one of those young people who have had problems. Abuse It turned bad, she admitted. I think the problem with Formspring is that there's no recourse for the victim I get more abuse in person, so I was kind of used to it, she said. (more)

6 Questions on Social Media with Michael Wu
Today, we are honored to have Michael Wu, Principal Scientist at Lithium Technologies, participate in our social media Q&A. I still use the same mathematical approach in my daily work, but instead of analyzing data from human fMRI scans, I analyze human behavioral data on social media. Secondly, being a software vendor to some of the largest brands, ROI always comes up. Today, there are already hundreds and probably thousands of tools and services developed on top of Twitter and Facebook. (more)

SAIC Aims to Change Language Services Landscape with Hybrid Chat Translation ...
Chat Translation Featured Articles. In response to this ever-growing need for language service providers and users of translation services to operate more efficiently, Science Applications International Corp. ( SAIC( News - Alert ) ) has unveiled the industrys first-ever machine chat translation solution. Designed to enable tailored and adaptive contextual translation, this new integrated offering is meant for anyone that has to interact with another individual who speaks the same language or a different language, SAIC shared with TMC at the recent SpeechTEK( News - Alert ) 2011 in New York City, where SAIC debuted the solution. Weve brought a single platform that does both text and speech and combined it with hybrid machine translation, Hassan Sawaf, chief scientist for SAIC, told TMC( News - Alert ) during an interview at SpeechTEK. (more)

Getting your mobile to listen to you: trends in voice recognition
Indeed, most people have gotten used to these tools operating on mobile devices, helping people to control smartphones and navigation systems. Modern programmes like Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.5 are designed for users who occasionally have to draft a document or want to quickly throw a note up on Facebook. " It continued its work into the 1980s and 90s with ViaVoice, making it one of the pioneers of voice recognition programmes, focusing on commercial applications like call centres. Along with its Windows-based Dragon NaturallySpeaking programmes, Nuance has also started releasing systems for Apple Dragon Dictate 2.5. (more)

The Language Problem: Jaguars & The Turing Test
The word Jaguars is a different story. For other words, they may pull double duty as both nouns and verbs (love is one example) and the simple subject-verb-object structure indicates that the right candidate would be a noun, not a verb. So semantic analysis gets us part of the way there, but we still have over a dozen potential meanings to disambiguate, including cars, animals, a game console and several different types of military hardware. And while youve probably heard of the Jacksonville Jaguars NFL team, you probably didnt know that a international rugby team in the 80s, a second tier rugby team from Argentina, a Formula One racing team and the teams of Indiana University Purdue and the University of Houston Victoria are all also known at the Jaguars. (more)

How Machine Translation Has A Habit Of Mangling Multilingual SEO
Recent discussions force me to return to the subject of translation versus SEO particularly machine translation as it seems this old topic has not yet gone away. For multinational sites, maintaining your site can be an expensive affair, and the cost savings of machine translation seem outstandingly attractive. Often abbreviated to MT, machine translation involves using computers to do the work which human translators would normally do. Keywords are very special creations of the human mind I once nicknamed them abbreviated thoughts and have found myself using that description many times over the years as the easiest way to explain their different nature. (more)

Don't parlez-vous? Google enhances Translate app
Google enhances Translate app The inclusion of Siri on the iPhone 4S has brought a lot of attention generally to the topic of voice recognition on mobile devices. Now, Google is updating a feature in its Translate app for Android devices that can handle speech-to-speech translation among 14 languages. In all, Google is adding a dozen languages to English and Spanish, which were the two languages initially featured in the app. In a company blog post, Google explains how it works: You speak into your phone's microphone, and the Translate app will translate what you've said and read it aloud. (more)

Google and Microsoft Talk Artificial Intelligence
Technology Review : You both spoke on stage of how AI has been advanced in recent years through the use of machine-learning techniques that take in large volumes of data and figure out things like how to translate text or transcribe speech. What about the areas we want AI to help where there isn't lots of data to learn from? Eric Horvitz: I've often thought that if you had a cloud service in the sky that recorded every speech request and what happened nextevery conversation in every taxi in Beijing, for exampleit could be possible to have AI learn how to do everything. Isn't it difficult to use machine learning if the training data isn't already labeled and explained, to give the AI a "truth" to get started from? (more)

Yap Isn't Much Like Siri. So Why Does Amazon Want It?
CLT Blogs Justin Ruckman decoded SEC filings to turn up an intriguing recent Amazon acquisition : Yap, a Charlotte-based speech-recognition startup best known for its recently shuttered voicemail transcription app and backend services for some of Microsofts voice-to-text application. So far, Amazon hasnt publicly commented on or even confirmed Yaps acquisition, and didnt immediately respond to our attempts to find out what it plans to do with the company. What Yap does do, though, and does very well, is cloud-based voice transcription i.e., literal, word-for-word rendering of speech into text, at very high volume with very high accuracy but at very low cost. The closer analog to Yap then, isnt Siri, but Nuance, the company behind Dragons collection of voice applications for desktop and mobile, and whose engine powers the speech-to-text component of you guessed it Siri. (more)

Weekly News Roundup: Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)
Weekly News Roundup: Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) Translator has launched language labs. Reports say that the Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) Translator team has launched a new portal called Language Labs, which provides three experimental features Contextual Thesaurus, Translator Bookmarklet, and Universal Text Input. Under the program educational institutions get equipped with the structure for a program that has the instant recognition and credibility of the Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) brand, with the program bringing together students, educators and communities, offering IT training and certification on the latest Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) technologies. Jeremy Champlin, RAFT IT Specialist says, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)s support of RAFT will allow us to offer new workshops for educators focused on the latest versions of Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)s productivity software. (more)

Why Watson Can't Talk to Siri
On Tuesday night, I was schooled by Watson on playing Jeopardy in an exhibition match at the Computer History Museum. David Ferrucci, the guy at IBM behind Watsons creation, explained during a conversation before the match that as intuitive as the interactions with Siri or Watson appear to us, they are fundamentally task-oriented. Watsons tasks are thus to figure out the context associated with a question, determine which answer is the likeliest based on that context, and then reckon if its confident enough in the probabilities to bother answering. Watsons Greater Firepower Siri, on the other hand, does two important things: It recognizes speech (Watson actually doesnt understand speech, but is fed a text version of the question) and it can figure out what steps to take in a limited number of applications, once it understands the words in a natural language process related to the process by which Watson functions. (more)

The Irish Times
iRobot TELL ME a joke Siri. If you converse with someone behind a computer screen and you cant tell if this is a person or a machine, then the machine has truly demonstrated artificial intelligence, he concluded. Each year the Loebner Prize competition gathers a panel of expert judges to see if they can be tricked by AI (artificial intelligence) software known as chatbots, which are programmed to mimic human conversation. Despite his seemingly playful nature Do-Much-More hasnt spotted that in this context the judge was talking about a band, and the brave chatbot doesnt even consider admitting to the judge that it doesnt understand. (more)

Speech Recognition Tits for the Busy Radiologist
- While sometimes speech recognition systems may seem downright dullard, they are learning all the time, and learn best when exposed to continuous phrases. Also, when the software makes a mistake, try to correct the entire phrase rather than the offending word, particularly if youre using an older system. - Pick away at your systems errors. Correct a single word or phrase per reading session and in a month youll have eliminated dozens of potential errors and boosted accuracy without feeling like youre spending undue time doing software calibration. (more)

Dragon Express 1.0: An inexpensive way to discover speech recognition
Dragon Express 1.0 Dragon Express is an easy and fun speech recognition utility that introduces OS X Lion customers to voice recognition for the Mac. Its fast and easy to place your text wherever you need it: transfer icons within the Dragon Express window include the active application (such as Microsoft Word or Text Edit) as well as popular applications such as Mail, Facebook and Twitter. Dragon Express includes the ability to select and delete text by voice as well as the convenient scratch that command that can be used when you change your mind. Dragon Express Knows When to Listen Dragon Express can be used with the internal microphone of your Mac, but a USB headset is recommended. (more)

Google to Launch Siri Rival for Android
9,087 viewsGoogle plans to launch a voice assistant for Android to rival Apples Siri, integrating voice recognition with its established search capabilities. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company is rumored to be working on the voice assistant software at its secret laboratory, Google X, according to the site Android and Me, and may launch the service within the next few weeks. Codenamed Majel after the late actress Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, who provided the computerized voice of the Starship Enterprise in Star Trek, the technology will reportedly upgrade Androids Voice Actions app, which lets users make calls, get directions and perform searches on Android smartphones using voice commands. However, Voice Actions only responds to preset voice commands. (more)

Voice input for medical apps to trend?
Thats the mindset of NuancesJonathon Dreyer, senior manager of mobile solutions marketing at the companys healthcare division: I definitely think voice will be the primary form of input into these mobile devices, Dreyer told MobiHealthNews recently. The biggest thing holding up app developers [for our platform] is approval of their apps [from Apple], he said. The main types of apps using Nuance are point of care and reference, while other categories include pharma, clinical trials, education programs, patient communications, and disease management apps. Dreyer believes that these categories will eventually change: These things will morph over time, and well see new categories emerge, as well as categories we thought were categories turn out to not be categories. (more)

Chat Translation: NTT Docomo Debuts First Speech-to-Speech Translation App
Chat Translation Featured Articles.If you've ever been struggling with a foreign language dictionary abroad, wishing that you could simply speak into a machine and have your chat translated for you, NTT( News - Alert ) Docomo may be ready to make your wish come true. The company, which is Japans number one cell phone carrier is about to begin offering a new real-time speech-to-speech translation service that you can use both in person and over the phone during a call, according to Geek.com According to Japanese news services, the solution is the first automated chat translation service in the world that is available on a standard cell phone. To start, the service will provide translation between English and Japanese (the English option allows users to choose British English, American English or Australian English) and Japanese and Korean. (more)

UB's Srihari Wins Major International Computer Science Award
His speech, entitled "Probabilistic Graphical Models in Machine Learning," focused on the design of computer programs that learn and are able to modify their behavior in an environment of constantly changing information. Machine learning is crucial in fields such as document analysis and recognition due to the difficulty of expressing perceptual images, such as handwriting, in algorithms that computers can understand. Many second-generation machine learning programs were enabled by postal data collected at the Buffalo post office by UB CEDAR students. " Research by Srihari, his colleagues and students at CEDAR that allowed machines to recognize and understand handwriting was at the core of the first handwritten address-interpretation system used by the U.S. (more)

It's Only A Matter Of Time Before Siri Passes The Turing Test
So as this database grows by orders of magnitude and the logic is refined accordingly, if a Turing Test is fashioned to distinguish a computer from a person in the day-to-day tasks of working with a personal assistant in one room is hidden an iPhone, in another room a person, you interact with them as you would an executive assistant over the course of the day, and then at the end of the day you choose which one you think is the person it is only a matter of time before the iPhone becomes indistinguishable from the human. There already is an annual Turing Test underway, the Loebner competition, where a set of judges spend a few minutes conversing (via keyboard) with computers and with people, and then have to decide which is which. A more reasonable Turing Test would be to invite a computer into a round of dinner conversations where the human subjects are not made aware that this is occurring. (more)

Why Allow Customers to Suffer the Consequences from Bad Chat Translations?
SMT, Lionbridge officials explain, has contributed to the growth in machine translation applications in recent years since it can analyze vast amounts of previously translated material, and target-language texts to create what Lionbridge officials say is a real-time translation in a fraction of the time that it takes to produce traditional rules- based translation systems. The way it works, is customer use the Customizer along with customer-supplied translation memories and glossary assets, GeoFluent then translates for each customer by application domain, applying machine-learning methods to analyze your translation memories, glossaries and target- language documents, Lionbridge officials explain, consistent with your terminology and branding. Through this just-inked agreement, the two companies will create Lionbridge GeoFluent for LivePerson Chat, an integrated cloud-based multilingual chat application that enables contact centers and enterprises to gain access to on-demand, quality translation that can take place directly within their eLivePerson chat application. (more)

What Makes Siri Special?
If you ask Siri, the virtual personal assistant on the iPhone 4S, why it's so great, it answers with disarming humility: "I am what I am. " Siri goes well beyond voice recognition, they say, by applying powerful artificial intelligence and statistical analysis to decipher the meaning behind questioners' sometimes jumbled sentences. Add to that Siri's dry wit and you have the kind of breakout hit that will propel new uses of similar technology on your phone, tablet, and even your PC, experts say. When you ask Siri to find a nearby restaurant, Siri doesn't just use speech recognition to deal with the request; Services like Siri are "natural language processing" apps that use statistical models to figure out what you probably meant to say when your pronunciation or word choice is garbled. (more)

Google Translate
It already speaks 57 languages as well as a 10-year-old. Newer methodsdominated by Googleturn the problem around: Using data, statistics, and brute force, they succeed in part by their refusal to "deconstruct" language and teach meaning to computers in the traditional way. Google is grossly outperforming the rule-based methods that have historically been used to teach language to computers. These classic methods work on the principle that language can be decoded, stripped to its purest component parts of "meaning," and built back up again into another language. (more)

'Artificial intelligence' 221b Sherlock Holmes game
Game developer Rollo Carpenter tells the BBC's Chris Vallance about the AI interrogation techniques written into the free online game 221b. He has programmed it to recognise a large number of potential questions that gamers could ask characters in the Sherlock Holmes game. The aim is to make characters respond in the way humans do, rather than requiring precisely-worded questions. Mr Carpenter has developed an array of artificial intelligence software. He set up the 'chatbot' site www.cleverbot.com , which attempts to respond to questions in as human a manner as possible. He has also won several competitions aimed at outwitting humans into believing they are not talking to a computer. 12/26/2009. (more)

Building Watson - A Brief Overview of the DeepQA Project
YouTube Video on some of the technical aspects of Watson, with links to several other videos about Watson. (December 13, 2010. (more)

CSE Colloquia - 2005: Natural Language Processing.
Natural language processing offers a rich problem domain for machine learning approaches. Many NLP problems require the induction of a mapping that involves complex, discrete structures such as strings, labeled sequences, or trees. In this distinguished lecture, Michael Collins [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] describes how 'large margin' methods in machine learning can be generalized to 'structured' problems found in NLP. December 7, 2005. (more)

Computer Chronicles: Artificial Intelligence (1986).
What is Artificial Intelligence? Does AI even exist? These are just two of the questions addressed in this episode. Topics covered include expert systems, machine vision, decision support software, natural languageprocessing, and speech recognition systems. Hosted by Stuart Cheifet and Gary Kildall, with commentary from George Morrow. Guests: Hubert Dreyfus, UC Berkeley; Gary Hendrix, Symantec; S. Jerrold Kaplan, Lotus Development; Harry Tennant, Texas Instruments; and Terry Winograd, Stanford University. January 2, 1986. (more)

Computer Chronicles: Robots - Japanese Style (1985).
Host Stewart Cheifet visits High Tech Expo '85 in Tsukuba (Science City), Japan, to look the latest computer and robotics technology. 1985. (more)

Computer Chronicles: Speech Synthesis (1984).
A look at speech synthesis and speech recognition technologies and applications with host, Stewart Cheifet, co-host, Herb Lechner (SRI International), and guests Carl Berne (Speech Plus), and Ron Stevens (Votan). Products discussed and demonstrated during the program include Minolta's Talking Camera, Texas Instruments' Speak & Spell, a text-to-speech system from Speech Plus, and the Votan V-5000 speech recognition system. The program also includes two "Computer Principles" lessons from Herb Lechner as well as his Chronicles' Summary. 1984. (more)

Overview Talk on Informatics by Edward "Ted" H. Shortliffe, MD, PhD., presented at the Biomedical Informatics @ Arizona State University Symposium 2006.
An overview of the field, from inception to current trends, and suggestions for how to establish a new Biomedical Informatics academic program. January 19, 2006. (more)

SIAI Interview Series: Barney Pell, Powerset CEO.
Dr. Barney Pell is an SIAI Advisor and co-founder and CEO of Powerset, a San Francisco company working to build a transformative consumer search engine. In this interview, Pell talks about advanced AI, progress in the AI field, Powerset, his involvement with SIAI, his robotics work at NASA Ames, the dangers of AI, the importance of foresight, and more. May 30, 2007. (more)

Video of the Winograd-Demonstration SHRDLU.
Video showing the commands and queries given to Winograd's SHRDLU system, together with the view of the blocks in SHRDLU's blocks world. Includes examples of explanations given by the program about why & how the program manipulating the blocks performed some actions. (more)

Washburn Lecture Series at the Museum of Science, Boston: "2001: A Space Odyssey. Are we there yet?" Lecture one (of three) - Human/Computer Conversation: HAL and Beyond, with Justine Cassell, Ph.D..
Justine Cassell's lecture, "Human/Computer Conversation: HAL and Beyond," was the first in the three speaker lecture series: "2001: A Space Odyssey. Are we there yet?" November 6, 2001. (more)