Machine translation technology: IBM and KACST

The Saudi Arabian National Research and Development Organization announced yesterday a multi-year agreement to collaborate on, amongst other areas, the advancement of Machine-Translation technologies. Under terms of the agreement, King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) will purchase an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer that will enable its researchers to perform complex simulations and computational modelling. The software giant will provide training services to KACST researchers on the functionality and features of Statistical Machine Translation technology. IBM's Research and Development team will be in charge of building the machine translation system with the initial basic system capabilities, which will be trained with several million words of data - the basis of the translation training process. IBM will commit researchers, and business consultants and KACST scientists will work together to further enhance the IBM Machine Translation Engine into a powerful translation engine to translate Arabic to other languages. This project deals with natural language analysis and computational methods for language translation. Technologies used for machine translation, such as syntactic parsing and word sense disambiguation, are commonly used in other applications of natural language processing. The agreement is one of several joint research projects undertaken between both organizations. Help will also be provided on Intellectual Property Development management so that IBM's expertise is used to help KACST tools and processes that turn its inventions into patents. The agreement also includes collaboration to create the National Center for Women Engineers. Full story has been reported in several sites: zawya.com, ameinfo.com, and the US-Saudia Arabian Business Council.

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Carla Estefanía

11/18/09