From Inspiration to Commercialization
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From Inspiration to Commercialization
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Issue 6 March 2007 |
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| Language Industry Program (LIP) | ||||
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You are a private company working in language technologies? You need financial assistance to undertake marketing projects (brochures, websites, etc.), participate in trade fairs and missions, in Canada or abroad or create a communication plan? The Language Industry Program (LIP) is there to help you! You could obtain up to $10 000 for your projects!
The Language Industry Program, which started in 2003, has provided financial assistance to more than 200 projects. LIP will end this year and there are only two deadlines left in order to receive a contribution for your activities:
For more information, refer to the LIP website: http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/lip
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| A second company in incubation at the LTRC | ||||
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Infoglobe.TechniK, Infoglobe’s research and development division, is a Québec City-based company with over 100 employees that specializes in open-source software. It is teaming up with the LTRC in order to increase the functionalities of MBox, its flagship product. Mbox is an interactive satellite broadcasting tool used for live training and videoconferencing. Infoglobe is currently seeking to improve the interactivity of this module through a voice recognition function. The new functionality has very promising applications. For instance, it will allow users to browse training programs by vocally interacting with the system in the same way as some voice recognition services already in use in the telephony field. Users can ask questions and obtain answers orally, thus eliminating tedious use of a keyboard or remote. The new technology that is in the process of being developed can also be used to obtain a text version of voice data. For instance, during videoconferences involving several hundred people, as is frequently the case in the medical field, and where participants interact by microphone, the system will be capable of quickly converting into text the questions asked by participants, who are often hundreds if not thousands of kilometres apart, which will benefit the host(s), who can then quickly review the questions and provide pertinent answers. Lastly, this technology is also paving the way to greater interactivity in closed-circuit video systems operated by certain retailers, who can propose information videos to their customers where answers can be obtained to specific questions or where customers can indicate certain preferences, for instance.
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| The ACCORD project: In step with the industry | ||||
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In 2003, the Government of Canada’s Action Plan for Official Languages revealed the major challenges that the language industry was facing. Subsequently, major projects were undertaken to give the Canadian language industry new cohesiveness. The first of these major structuring projects was the Technology Roadmap Project headed by Industry Canada, which brought together all of the industry players around a detailed assessment of the situation and which allowed possible solutions to be defined. The ACCORD project (Action concertée de coopération régionale de développement / Concerted action for regional development cooperation) was started up by the Ministère du Développement économique, de l’Innovation et de l’Exportation du Québec (MDEIE) in 2005-2006 and completed in 2006-2007. The project determined that the language industry is a niche with high growth potential in the Outaouais region and as such could benefit from special assistance for its development. The project highlighted the four pillars that would allow the Outaouais region to be granted the status of emerging niche of excellence: dynamic university programs, a vast pool of language professionals, the proximity of a major client, and, most critically, the presence of the Language Technologies Research Centre. The ACCORD project gave the language industry, both in the Outaouais region and elsewhere, first-rate assets and especially a strategic vision: to become a world leader in the language industry by 2020 thanks to high-tech companies that will support highly competitive and high-quality multilingual language services. This vision was then used to define avenues of development and to draw up a concrete plan of action. Once the plan is implemented, the region will have major assets on its side: a respectable industry through its size and reputation, a pool of qualified professionals to meet the industry’s needs and, especially, companies which, thanks to the LTRC, will be given a chance to develop high-tech expertise on an international scale, where the industry’s future will be decided.
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| Québec Research and Innovation Strategy Measures Adapted to IT and Regional R&D |
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The Québec research and innovation strategy entitled An Innovative, Prosperous Québec is centered around three key guidelines:
The purpose of the strategy is to strengthen innovation mechanisms in Québec to ensure the prosperity of one and all. It consists of structuring measures over a three-year period that will result in investments totalling $888 million, broken down as follows:
Measures Adapted to IT and Regional R&D
Pertinent Documents
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| PORTAGE licenced to Canadian universities | ||||
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The NRC state-of-the-art statistical machine translation (SMT) system PORTAGE is now available under licence, in both source code and executable code, to Canadian universities interested in pursuing research and education in SMT. The announcement of this NRC initiative can be found at : http://iit-iti.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/projects-projets/portage-shared_e.html . At this time, PORTAGEshared has been licenced to three Canadian universities: McGill University, SFU (Simon Fraser University), and the University of Toronto. Any Canadian university interested in this new R&D community in SMT is welcome, whether or not it is already involved in such activities. If interested, please see the URL above.
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| TransCheck: third phase of development | ||||
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Following the second phase of the LTRC project TransCheck (translation error detection) during which the performance of the prototype was evaluated by the RALI laboratory of Université de Montréal, the project has entered its third development phase aiming at broadening its full false friend detection capability to the detection of partial false friends, a difficult task that, if achieved, will have great benefits. This new phase of the LTRC project TransCheck is planned for completion by March 31st, 2007.
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| TerminoWeb: first prototype being tested | ||||
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The TerminoWeb NRC-IIT project has reached a first milestone at the end of December, 2006, as its prototype was made available on-line for testing by selected users. See http://iit-iti.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/projects-projets/terminoweb_e.html for a description of the TerminoWeb project. The TerminoWeb prototype is presented at : http://termino.iit.nrc.ca/ . The presentation of the TerminoWeb project in January to the Federal Terminology Advisory Group triggered several follow-up requests. If interested by TerminoWeb, please see the above URLs for contact persons.
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| NRC transfers its FACTOR technology to Nstein | ||||
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The Interactive Information Group of NRC-IIT, which collaborates closely with the Interactive Language Technologies Group and works also in Natural Language Processing, recently signed a licence agreement and a R&D collaboration agreement with Nstein, a text analytics company based in Montreal, in order to transfer the FACTOR text mining technology of NRC to Nstein. For further information, please see: http://iit-iti.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/new-neuf/2006/06-12-14_e.html , and http://www.nstein.com/cgi-bin/fe/pr.pl?action=show_pr&id=292
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| NRC-IIT researcher wins first place in an international text mining competition | ||||
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Dr. Cyril Goutte, a researcher in the Interactive Language Technologies Group of NRC-IIT, took first place in the international Anomaly Detection/Text Mining competition sponsored by NASA Ames Research Center. As a result, Dr. Goutte will be presenting his award-winning method at the 2007 Text Mining Workshop held in conjunction with the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics’ (SIAM) seventh International Conference on Data Mining, April 26-28, 2007 in Minneapolis, Minnesota (USA). Congratulations, Cyril ! For further details, see: http://iit-iti.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/new-neuf/2007/07-03-01_e.html
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| Call for papers – Special Issue of Terminology on Pattern-Based Approaches to Semantic Relation Extraction 14(1), 2008 | ||||
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Automatically extracting semantic relations - the building blocks of ontologies - from free text is a way of minimizing the labor-intensive phase of manual knowledge engineering and thus overcoming the long-standing knowledge acquisition bottleneck. In the context of computational terminology, important snippets of definitional information can be found in text as expressed explicitly in knowledge-rich contexts (KRCs), often identified by looking for so-called “knowledge patterns” (KPs). This special issue of Terminology on the topic of semantic relation extraction – with Alain Auger (DRDC-Valcartier) and Caroline Barrière (NRC-IIT) as Guest Editors – is primarily interested in pattern-based approaches, but would also welcome articles suggesting other methods (applied in a terminological context) for semantic relation extraction if put in a comparative setting with pattern-based approaches. The purpose must be domain-specific (application) even if the method could be general. Papers dealing with extraction of general knowledge (such as methods to recreate a Wordnet-like ontology) will not be accepted. The full announcement can be found at: http://pbsr.iltevents.org/ Important Dates – Full paper received: June 4th 2007; acceptance/rejection notice: September 7th 2007, final papers due: November 5th 2007. The LTRC thanks the readers of Cybermag-TL for their interest and for helping to disseminate the newsletter. This online information magazine, which is also posted on the LTRC’s website (www.ltrc.ca), is designed to keep language industry and information technology partners and stakeholders up to date with the latest news from the LTRC. Please continue to spread the word among your colleagues, and contact us (info@ltrc.ca) with your feedback, suggestions and comments! Language Technologies Research Centre
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Quebec Research and Innovation Strategy – An Innovative, Prosperous Québec – pdf format, 75 p., 580 kb