How the PoolParty Semantic Suite is learning to speak 40+ languages

Business is becoming more and more globalised, and enterprises and organisations are acting in several different regions and thus facing more challenges of different cultural aspects as well as respective language barriers. Looking at the European market, we even see 24 working languages in EU28, which make cross-border services considerably complicated. As a result, powerful language technology is needed, and intense efforts have already been taken in the EU to deal with this situation and enable the vision of a multilingual digital single market (a priority area of the European Commission this year, see: http://ec.europa.eu/priorities/digital-single-market/).

Here at the Semantic Web Company we also witness fast-growing demands for language-independent and/or specific-language and cross-language solutions to enable business cases like cross-lingual search or multilingual data management approaches. To provide such solutions, a multilingual metadata and data management approach is needed, and this is where PoolParty Semantic Suite comes into the game: as PoolParty follows W3C semantic web standards like SKOS, we have language-independent-based technologies in place and our customers already benefit from them. However, as regards text analysis and text extraction, the ability to process multilingual information and data is key for success – which means that the systems need to speak as many languages as possible.

Our new cooperation with K Dictionaries (KD) is enabling the PoolParty Semantic Suite to continuously “learn to speak” more and more languages, by making use of KD’s rich monolingual, bilingual and multilingual content and its long-time experience in lexicography as a base for improved multi-language text analysis and processing.

KD (http://kdictionaries.com/ http://kdictionaries-online.com/) is a technology-oriented content and data creator that is based in Tel Aviv and cooperates with publishing partners, ICT firms, the academe and professional associations worldwide. It deals with nearly 50 languages, offering quality monolingual, bilingual and multilingual lexical datasets, morphological word forms, phonetic transcription, etc.

As a result of this cooperation, PoolParty now provides language bundles in the following languages, which can be licensed together with all types of PoolParty servers:

• English
• French
• German
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Russian
• Slovak
• Spanish

Additional language bundles are in preparation and will be in place soon!

Furthermore, SWC and KD are partners in a brand new EUREKA project that is supported by a bilateral technology/innovation program between Austria and Israel. The project is called LDL4HELTA (Linked Data Lexicography for High-End Language Technology Application) and combines lexicography and Language Technology with Semantic Web and Linked (Open) Data mechanisms and technologies to improve existing and develop new products and services. It integrates the products of both partners to better serve existing customers and new ones, as well as to enter together new markets in the field of Linked Data lexicography-based Language Technology solutions. This project has been successfully kicked off in early July and has a duration of 24 months, with the first concrete results due early in 2016.

The LDL4HELTA project is supported by a research partner (Austrian Academy of Sciences) and an expert Advisory Board including  Prof Christian Chiarcos (Goethe University, Frankfurt), Mr Orri Erling (OpenLink Software), Dr Sebastian Hellmann (Leipzig University), Prof Alon Itai (Technion, Haifa), and Ms Eveline Wandl-Wogt (Austrian Academy of Sciences).

So stay tuned and we will inform you about news and activities of this cooperation here in the blog continuously!