languages

Microsoft has now officially acquired Powerset, a natural language search firm, completing the deal it announced last month.

In a blog posting on Monday, Powerset's Mark Johnson said that integration efforts are already well under way. "This Thursday and Friday, there will be a bunch of folks down from Redmond for a symposium to share details about our respective technologies," Johnson said. "We're excited to learn about everything now available to Powerset in the Live Search stack. We're also excited to share the cool things we've cooked up here at Powerset and start … Read more

A number of materials, including textbooks, videotapes, and software, teach sign language. But Hitachi researcher Hirohiko Sagawa and his cohorts see limitations with those methods. They have created a prototype model of a mobile phone that displays Japanese sign language movements via 3D animation. Users can shift the viewing angles and enlarge animated images to get a more well-rounded sense of what the gestures entail.

In the photo above, Sagawa shows off the prototype at the Japanese electronics giant's advanced technology fair in Tokyo on Thursday.

One solution to the what-to-do-with-the-iPhone-1.0 dilemma that occurred to me over lunch with my grandpa on Tuesday (in San Francisco's Chinatown no less) was to give him my old iPhone 1.0.

My grandfather is an immigrant and a jolly, happy type who stays vibrant by talking with his friends from church or with family members. But because English is not his first language and because he's not as tech-savvy as his grandchildren, he has often found dealing with a typical cell phone difficult. The technology gap, generation gap, and language gap all posed by a typical … Read more

Geek culture is once again showing its influence over the mainstream lexicon in the latest version of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, which includes word additions such as webinar, malware, netroots, pretexting (thank you Hewlett-Packard), and fanboy (thank you Apple).

Webinar is "one more example of the significant ongoing trend for electronic technologies to add words to the language," Merriam-Webster publisher John Morse said in a Monday press release about the 100 or so new words in the 2008 edition of the influential reference guide.

That's in line with Merriam-Webster's choice of the term "wOOt"… Read more

Some people whose posts may otherwise have been deleted by censors in China have taken to writing backwards in an effort to defeat keyword-searching authorities.

"Bloggers on forums such as Tianya.cn have taken to posting in formats that China's Internet censors, often employees of commercial Internet service providers, have a hard time automatically detecting. One recent strategy involves online software that flips sentences to read right to left instead of left to right, and vertically instead of horizontally," write Juliet Ye and Geoffrey Fowler in The Wall Street Journal.

This is a particularly clever solution in … Read more

We work in an industry with its own language--acronyms.

A lot of them come and go or are so esoteric that few people in industry even know about them. I'm hopeful that a standard I'm tracking won't fall into one of these buckets. It is called the Extensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML, pronounced zack-mil). This markup language was first ratified by OASIS in 2003. XACML 3.0 is currently in the works.

What's so special about XACML? This standard has the potential to help simplify the mess around two questions:

• Who should have access … Read more

There may come a day when telling someone to "talk to the hand" will be socially acceptable.

Designers Bhargav Bhat, Hemant Sikaria, and Priya Narasimhan are working on a prototype called "HandTalk," which essentially is a phone for the hearing impaired. This wearable glove device detects the motions and gestures used in sign language, translates them into audio, then plays it all back on a cell phone or mobile device.

Recently showcased at the Meeting Of The Minds expo at Carnegie Mellon University Center, the mobile software app can reportedly detect 32 words to date--a mere … Read more

Google is slated to release a robust Chinese-English dictionary featuring 13 dictionaries in collaboration with Kingsoft, a producer of PC-based dictionaries, according to a Chinese blog that I will inadequately translate as "Dances With Google."

The new product will drop Thursday at 2:30 a.m. China time, according to the blog. It will include such things as menu items, which are often perilously mistranslated into English.

h/t Google Blogoscoped.

Over the years, Microsoft has taken different approaches to offering online support. Some of you may remember Microsoft Bob, a bizarre software desktop replacement whose personal guides were supposed to offer personalized help.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, the product went nowhere and is now better-known as the answer to the trivia question, "What was Melinda French's claim to product fame?" (Of course, Melinda French later went on to fame and fortune as Mrs. Melinda Gates.)

Most computer users are more familiar with the Clippy, the office assistant Microsoft put into Office 97 that offered advice to user queries. … Read more