Translate This! USC Researchers Build Machine Translation System For Hindi - And More - in Less Than a Month.Business Editors/High-Tech Writers LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 1, 2003 In less than a month, researchers at USC's Information Sciences Institute (ISI) and collaborators nationwide have built one of the world's best systems to translate Hindi text into English and query Hindi databases using English questions. The effort was part of the "Surprise Language" project, a test of the computer science community's ability to quickly create translation tools for previously un-researched languages. The exercise was sponsored by the Defense Advance Research Project Agency (DARPA) and ended July 1. "A month ago, we didn't even know what language we would be working on," explained Ulrich Germann, a computational linguist at ISI, part of the University of Southern California The U.S. News & World Report ranked USC 27th among all universities in the United States in its 2008 ranking of "America's Best Colleges", also designating it as one of the "most selective universities" for admitting 8,634 of the almost 34,000 who applied for freshman admission School of Engineering. At 10:55 p.m. PDT on June 1, the manager for DARPA's TIDES (Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization) program fired the starting gun with an email: "Surprise Language is Hindi.... Good luck!" Teams at 11 different sites across the US and one in the UK jumped into action. Twenty-nine days later, they can present an impressive array of information processing tools for Hindi. "We succeeded in all aspects of the exercise," said Douglas W. Oard, an associate professor at the University of Maryland University of Maryland can refer to:
In addition to USC/ISI, other participating institutions included the University of Maryland, College Park The University of Maryland, College Park (also known as UM, UMD, or UMCP) is a public university located in the city of College Park, in Prince George's County, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C., in the United States. ; the IBM Thomas J. Watson Thomas John Watson, Sr. (February 17, 1874 – June 19, 1956) was the president of International Business Machines (IBM), who oversaw that company's growth into an international force from the 1920s to the 1950s. Research Laboratory, Carnegie-Mellon University; the University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley is a public research university located in Berkeley, California, United States. Commonly referred to as UC Berkeley, Berkeley and Cal ; New York University New York University, mainly in New York City; coeducational; chartered 1831, opened 1832 as the Univ. of the City of New York, renamed 1896. It comprises 13 schools and colleges, maintaining 4 main centers (including the Medical Center) in the city, as well as the ; the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Johns Hopkins University; the University of Pennsylvania; the University of Sheffield (U.K.); the MITRE Corporation; BBN Technologies, and the Navy Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR). Note: A demonstration of the ISI system is available to media on Thursday, July 3 at the ISI's laboratories in Marina del Rey, California Marina del Rey (Spanish for "Navy of the King", or "Seacoast of the King") is a census-designated place seaside community located in an unincorporated area of Los Angeles County, California, United States. The population was 8,176 as of the 2000 census. . Visual material would show the Lighthouse visualization system at work finding, identifying and translating material. Further information may be found at http://www.usc.edu/isinews/stories/98.html. |
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