Basis Technology (www.basistech.com), which provides software solutions for extracting meaningful intelligence from multilingual text, announced on November 17 that the software giant Microsoft Corp. (www.microsoft.com) has chosen the Rosette Linguistics Platform to support Web searches in its new MSN search engine (http://beta.search.msn.com). The companies have entered into a multi-year agreement in which Microsoft has the option to utilize all of Basis Technology's linguistics software, including components for language identification, morphological analysis, and entity extraction.
The Rosette Linguistics Platform uses state of the art Natural Language Processing techniques to improve information retrieval, text mining and other applications and apply them to global markets. Rosette provides capabilities like identifying the language of incoming text, providing a normalized representation in Unicode, and locating names, places and other key concepts. Rosette performs linguistic analysis that helps information retrieval applications understand search queries. For example, Rosette identifies individual words for languages such as Japanese that do not use spaces between words, breaks compound words into their individual components, and identifies parts-of-speech such as verb, adjective, etc. This information increases the accuracy of search results.
Justin Osmer, product manager for MSN Search, said that MSN Search aims to deliver fast, relevant search results to consumers all over the world, and that MSN is happy to work closely with Basis Technology because of their long and distinguished track record in supporting multilingual search. Carl Hoffman, CEO of Basis Technology, said that being chosen by Microsoft to support this essential component of their new MSN Search service is very exciting, and that Basis Technology is committed to ensuring that MSN Search consumers have an excellent experience regardless of the language they are using.
Top-tier software vendors, content providers, multinational enterprises, and government agencies rely on Basis Technology's solutions for Unicode compliance, language identification, multilingual search, normalization, transliteration, and entity extraction. Clients include Amazon.com, America Online, Ask Jeeves, Convera, Endeca, FAST, Hewlett-Packard, L.L Bean, Northrop Grumman, PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems, Software AG and Verity.
