Basis Technology Announces Chinese Morphological Analyzer; America Online, Ask Jeeves, Excalibur, Lycos Among Early CMA Adopters.

Business/Technology Editors

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 10, 2000

Basis Technology (www.basistech.com), the premier provider of internationalization services and technology, announced today the release of its Chinese Morphological Analyzer (CMA), believed to be the world's most accurate segmentation engine for search and retrieval of Chinese text. CMA has already been adopted by leading Internet search companies America Online, Inc. (NYSE: AOL), Ask Jeeves, Inc. (NASDAQ: ASKJ), Excalibur Technologies (NASDAQ: EXCA) and Lycos, Inc. (NASDAQ: LCOS).

"China is poised to emerge as a major force in the Asia-Pacific e-conomy. The number of Internet users in China, now 10 million, is doubling every six months -- the fastest growth in Asia," said Carl Hoffman, president of Basis Technology. "We are pleased to offer the superior search and retrieval solution for companies entering this exploding market."

Chinese Morphological Analyzer combines dictionary-retrieval technology with syntactic analysis to yield the most accurate text segmentation results for both the simplified and traditional written forms of the language. CMA boasts the most comprehensive online Chinese dictionary of nearly 1,000,000 headwords, incorporating phonological, lexical and grammatical attributes. This information is used by the CMA algorithms to segment and accurately disambiguate Chinese text using contextual clues combined with syntactic analysis.

Morphological analysis of the Chinese language is an inherently complex problem. Chinese is written without explicit word boundaries, and it lacks the script transition cues of Japanese and Korean scripts. Furthermore, each character can potentially function as an isolated word (free morpheme) or part of a compound word (bound morpheme) or phrase. For these reasons, maintaining online forms and databases, and facilitating effective search and retrieval, are particularly difficult in the Chinese language.

"Ask Jeeves is committed to providing locally relevant answers to users' questions no matter where they live, or what questions they ask," said Claudio Pinkus, chief operating officer of Ask Jeeves International. "We are continuing to expand internationally and must address the challenge of implementing the Ask Jeeves service in non-English speaking countries. We are excited to partner with as established and respected a company as Basis Technology, whose products will help us address this challenge in Asia."

"Basis Technology's CMA has enabled us to develop a product that understands the Chinese language. We are confident that search results with our RetrievalWare(R) product are as precise as our results in other major languages," said Kamran Khan, general manager and senior vice president at Excalibur Technologies.

Excalibur Technologies, the leading provider of intelligent search solutions for intranet portals and Internet e-commerce applications, selected both CMA and Rosette from Basis Technology as the foundation for its Chinese version of Visual RetrievalWare(R).

According to Jack Halpern, director of linguistics and dictionary development at Basis Technology, "Basis Technology's CMA has achieved outstanding segmentation accuracy since it is the only system in the world based on large-scale, up-to-date lexica, not just on statistical and syntactic approaches."

Chinese Morphological Analyzer is written in portable ANSI C++ and has a pure Unicode (UCS2) internal architecture that handles every major Chinese encoding format.

Chinese Morphological Analyzer is licensed as a royalty-free software development kit (SDK) or as a source code distribution on all major platforms, including Win32, Solaris, HP-UX, Digital UNIX and Linux. For more information, please visit www.basistech.com or email [e-mail].

About Basis Technology

Basis Technology is the leading provider of internationalization technology and services for Internet companies and global enterprises. The company specializes in software re-engineering services for Unicode compliance, and offers a wide range of cross-platform software components that deliver off-the-shelf solutions to problems commonly encountered in internationalization projects.

The company's flagship product, Rosette, is the leading cross-platform library for Unicode, the rapidly emerging international standard for software that handles multiple languages. More than twenty top-tier Web software publishers, search engines and portals have adopted Rosette as the core of their globalization strategy. Basis Technology is the only Web internationalization company that is also a full member of the Unicode Consortium.

Basis Technology's multilingual professionals are veteran of more than one hundred software and Web internationalization projects. The company works closely with its customers to maximize the opportunities offered by rapidly expanding global markets.

Company headquarters are located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a branch office in Tokyo, Japan. For more information, visit www.basistech.com or call 617-252-5636.