LANGUAGE WEAVER ANNOUNCES SECOND STRATEGIC INVESTMENT AND Contract From In-Q-Tel
October 26, 2004
Los Angeles, CA
Just one year after Language Weaver, Inc., announced an initial investment and contract from In-Q-Tel, Inc., the company announces a follow-on contract and equity investment from this private venture group funded by the Central Intelligence Agency. Language Weaver is a software company developing statistical machine translation software (SMTS) for the automation of human language translation.
There is a critical need for translation by government organizations that are dealing with a glut of foreign language text documents that need translation into English in a timely manner. The additional contract and investment from In-Q-Tel is aimed at enhancing interoperability between Language Weaver’s SMTS and other natural language processing and analytical tool applications. Language Weaver takes a statistical approach to natural language processing, correlating words and word groupings to produce the highest probability of a correct match.
“Language Weaver is an important strategic partner for In-Q-Tel,” Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, said. “Its breakthrough approach to machine translation creates unprecedented opportunities for our government customers to translate and digest massive amounts of foreign language information. Language Weaver continues to enhance its technology, mature its business, and prove that it can deliver products quickly to customers.”
This new investment and contract from In-Q-Tel comes immediately on the heels of Language Weaver’s announcement that it has raised a Series B financing round of $4 million from venture capitalists, and just after it has been awarded a $2 million Advanced Technology Program award from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s NIST agency.
According to Bryce Benjamin, CEO of Language Weaver, the commercial viability of its technology overlaps national security needs. “Automated language translation is a crucial enabling technology not just for government customers, but also for multinational companies competing in a global marketplace,” Benjamin said. “Language Weaver’s technology can save companies both money and time in getting their information out into the worldwide marketplace.”
About Language Weaver, Inc.
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.