NLP Technologies leads $600,000 R&D project
R&D project on Machine Translation and automatic summarization of legal judgments and multi-lingual web translation management system.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Today Precarn Incorporated announced funding of a total of $2.5 million for 6 collaborative R&D projects. Among these was NLP Technologies‘ joint project with Palomino System Innovations Inc. of Toronto and the Université de Montréal.
NLP’s project is also published in the business sections of daily newspapers, the Gazette. The announcement will appear today, Friday November 28, 2008.
NLP Technologies is changing the way legal judgments are reviewed and distributed with Decision Express(TM), an automatic analysis system for legal documents that has the potential to provide electronic access to information and summaries of about 200,000 new judgments passed down in Canadian federal and provincial courts each year. As an added benefit, DecisionExpress is greatly reducing the huge amount of paper used in the legal profession each year.
With the $600,000 R&D project and funding infusion from Precarn, NLP will be enhancing its existing Internet-based service to include additional types of legal documents, including U.S.-based judgments, and will be adding a machine translation capability. Normally, a certified translation of a legal judgment takes several months to complete. NLP is aiming to shorten this time significantly using a unique statistical machine translation system - the first in the world to be ‘trained’ to understand legal documents - which has attracted the attention of the federal courts in Canada for its accuracy and speed.
This funding infusion will also be used to accelerate development of a statistical machine translation (SMT) integration that will interface with Palomino's WebPal CMS content management system to offer one-click translation management. NLP Technologies will be the lead participant in this project, with Palomino providing know-how of Content Management and localization work flow. A mutual licensing agreement will allow WebPal users to benefit from automatic translation service with respect to over 40 languages.