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Language Weaver Wins $2 Million Advanced Technology Program Award; Language Weaver Chosen as Winner for Prestigious Technology Funding Award from NIST
LOS ANGELES --(Business Wire)-- Sept. 29, 2004 -- Language Weaver, Inc., a Los Angeles-based software company developing statistical machine translation software (SMTS), today announced it has been awarded $2 million over three years in an Advanced Technology Program (ATP) Award by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a non-regulatory agency of the U.S. Commerce Department's Technology Administration.
Language Weaver won the award for a single company project and will use the money to develop syntax-based decoding for statistical machine translation systems. Language Weaver's project was one of 32 monetary winners chosen from a field of 870 proposals. NIST awarded a total of $80 million matched by $57 million in cost-share funding from partners for the 32 projects. The ATP provides funding for high risk projects that require more research and development than typical venture funders might be willing to underwrite. The awards are made on the basis of the potential for broad-based economic benefits, the difficulty of the technology, and evidence of a clear commercialization path and broad diffusion.
"Language Weaver is gratified that its technology has been recognized for its significant economic potential to help U.S. companies compete overseas, as well as its ability to provide support to U.S. national security efforts," said Bryce Benjamin, CEO of Language Weaver. "Language Weaver was a winner in a very competitive field -- less than four percent of the projects were chosen for the award this time -- and we believe our resulting efforts will significantly impact the quality of machine translation."
Over the course of the entire ATP, more than 6,900 proposals have been received with 768 selected for funding, approximately 11 percent over the life of the program. The ATP, through partnerships with the private sector, accelerates the development of innovative technologies that promise significant benefits for the nation and provides a mechanism for industry to extend its technological reach.
About the Advanced Technology Program
The Advanced Technology Program, managed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, provides cost-shared funding to industry for high-risk R&D projects with the potential to spark important, broad-based economic benefits for the United States. The awards are made on the basis of a rigorous peer-reviewed selection process. For more information, visit the ATP web site, www.atp.nist.gov.
About Language Weaver
Language Weaver was founded in 2002 to commercialize a unique approach to automatic language translation using proprietary statistical translation algorithms that resulted from 20 person-years of invention and development at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute (USC/ISI). Its resulting product, statistical machine translation software, provides the highest quality output to date from machine translation. The company has 15 patents pending on its SMTS technology. Bidirectional language pairs available include: Arabic/English, Chinese/English, French/English, and Spanish/English; unidirectional languages include Somali to English and Hindi to English, with others coming soon. Language Weaver's software is available as licensed software in client server and stand-alone versions. Website: www.languageweaver.com.
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