IBM licenses Arabic translation tool to online media firm

IBM has licensed its voice recognition tool, which ACN previously reported was under development in its Cairo research centre, to a media company to translate Arabic news broadcasts into English.

Critical Mention Inc., a web-based real time television news search and broadcast monitoring service, will be using IBM's TALES (Translingual Automation Language Exploitation System). The IBM technology processes the audio signal from Arabic television and radio stations and translates it into English.

Once the text has been indexed by the CriticalTV platform, subscribers to the service will be able to conduct real time searches of Arabic media and receive alerts when a search term is detected.

"The ever-shifting nature of the market compels business professionals to quickly and easily monitor a wide range of foreign events and world media," said Arthur Ciccolo of IBM Research. "The unique TALES technology, combined with Critical Mention's advanced real time search and monitoring system, will benefit organisations from all industry segments."

TALES combines search, speech-to-text conversion and machine translation technologies. Spoken words are converted into written words, then translated into the target language. To provide the most accurate results, the system uses statistical machine translation that employs automatically extracted word-to-word and phrase-to-phrase translations.