Basis Technology Releases Rosette Linguistics Platform 5.0.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Basis Technology announced today the availability of release 5.0 of its Rosette(R) Linguistics Platform (RLP). This release includes a wide range of new features and performance enhancements to Rosette's core technology, designed to provide a fast, accurate, flexible, and easy-to-integrate solution for tackling the most complex linguistic challenges.

New features and improvements include:

--Rosette Entity Extractor (REX) -- which identifies names, places, dates and other entities in unstructured text -- has added Traditional Chinese to its list of ten supported languages, and improved its overall speed by an average of 35 percent. Specific language accuracy was also improved, highlighted by Chinese and Arabic, which increased by 27 percent and 12 percent, respectively.

--Rosette Language Identifier (RLI) -- which identifies the language and encoding of a document -- has improved accuracy on short text segments which help with the analysis of smaller documents, and has added Pashto, Somali, and Urdu detection.

--The addition of a Japanese Orthographic Analyzer (JOA) which allows search engines and text mining applications to find occurrences of words that have multiple spelling variations but shared meaning, a common and frequent instance in the Japanese language. JOA enhances RLP's Base Linguistics component which performs critical functions such as word segmentation, decompounding, and part-of-speech analysis.

--Newly updated and greatly expanded Chinese and Japanese dictionaries.

"RLP's open technology platform has given our customers a unique, powerful, and customizable approach for capturing and analyzing unstructured text in many languages," said Steven Cohen, VP Products at Basis Technology. "We have always been a customer focused company and this release reaffirms our commitment to meeting customer needs through both product development and world class support."

Carl Hoffman, CEO of Basis Technology, said, "Our investments in CJK information retrieval technology are unmatched by any of our competitors, and the results are reflected in our market leadership. Today, our software powers more web searches in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean than that from any other linguistics provider, which is why every major web search engine--including America Online, Ask Jeeves, Google, MSN Search, and Yahoo!--are Basis Technology customers with successful businesses in Asia."

The Rosette Linguistics Platform is a suite of interoperable components for applications that analyze and process all the world's languages. RLP enables information retrieval applications and search engines to understand queries and search web pages in foreign languages by providing a linguistic analysis of each word. Each product incorporates an extensive knowledge base of the nuances of each language, enabling applications to deliver reliable, accurate search results in many languages.

Rosette Linguistics Platform release 5.0 is available for immediate evaluation. For more information, please contact Basis Technology at 617-386-2000 or [e-mail].

About Basis Technology

Basis Technology provides software solutions for multilingual text mining and information retrieval applications. The company's Rosette(R) Linguistics Platform is a suite of high-performance, robust, interoperable software components designed for applications that analyze and process all the world's languages.

Top-tier software vendors, content providers, multinational enterprises, and government agencies rely on Basis Technology's solutions for Unicode compliance, language identification, multilingual search, normalization, transliteration, and entity extraction. Clients include industry leaders America Online, Autonomy, Cisco, Convera, Endeca, FAST, Google, Hewlett-Packard, L.L Bean, Microsoft, Oracle, SAS, Symantec, and Yahoo. Government contractors include BBN, CACI, Lockheed Martin, MITRE, Northrop Grumman, and SAIC.

Company headquarters are in Cambridge, MA, with branch offices in San Francisco, CA; Herndon, VA; and Tokyo, Japan. For more information, visit www.basistech.com or call 800-697-2062.