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Asia Online Speaks The Right Language To Attract Japanese Investment
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News Release
Monday, April 14, 2008 |
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Leading Japanese Venture Capital Company Japan Asia Investment
Company (JAIC) named Asia Online's first institutional investor
Bangkok, Thailand: Monday 14 April, 2008 - Asia Online, an emerging Asian portal
and automated translation company, today announced that leading Japanese Venture
Capital company, Japan Asia Investment Company Ltd. (JAIC), has become the company's
first institutional investor.
JAIC's investment is an important milestone for Asia Online and is a key step in
the validation and execution of the company's vision to deliver large volumes of
local language content to non-English speaking Asia.
"Today, Asia accounts for more than 38% of all Internet users and by 2012 is expected
to account for almost 50%. Yet despite this vast pool of users, more than 86% of
all content on the Internet today is in non-Asian languages," said Dion Wiggins,
CEO of Asia Online. "Of the 14% representing Asian content, most is Chinese, Japanese
and Korean. All other Asian language content combined accounts for less than 0.03%
of all content online."
Asia Online's unique services will enable people to transcend language as a barrier
to knowledge by providing unrivalled access to hundreds of millions of pages of
information and knowledge – in their language of choice.
"Asia Online is revolutionizing access to web content by taking language out of
the equation," said Osamu Hosokubo, Director of JAIC. "Asia is the fastest growing
market for Internet users and online advertising is the fastest growing industry
in the world whilst the costs of IT resources and internet access are declining
relative to other business operations. JAIC is pleased to invest in Asia Online.
We believe the company is well positioned to take advantage of all these factors
via its unique content delivery model and technology platform."
Wiggins added that he expected JAIC's unrivalled relationships would help accelerate
and expand Asia Online's customer base in Japan and Asia: "We are delighted to get
such strong support from such a well renowned financial institution and are looking
forward to integrating with and adding value to JAIC's other portfolio of companies
via our unique translation platforms." said Wiggins.
About Asia Online PTE Ltd.
(www.asiaonline.net)
Asia Online’s unique services enable people to transcend language as a barrier to
knowledge by providing unrivalled access to the limitless store of English-language
content on the Internet, in their language of choice.
Asia Online's primary focus delivers huge amounts of content in local languages.
In doing so it has created a core technological infrastructure that enables massive
translation projects to be undertaken. Asia Online is working with language service
providers and publishers with its unique infrastructure that facilitates the ongoing
evolution of real time corrective improvements that aims to deliver machine translation
quality that is second to none.
Formed in 2006, Asia Online is a privately owned company backed by a number of individual
investors and institutional venture capital. It is headquartered in Singapore, with
operational headquarters in Bangkok, Thailand, from where it conducts R&D and daily
business operations. Asia Online currently employs more than 150 staff and is in
the process of being incorporated in an additional 10 Asian countries.
About Japan Asia Investment Company Ltd. (JAIC)
(http://www.jaic-vc.co.jp)
JAIC was established in 1981 by the Japan Association of Corporate Executives (Keizai
Doyukai) as an independent venture capital company and now ranks as one of Japan's
largest venture capital companies. In addition to its headquarters in Tokyo and
an office in the United States, JAIC has six branch offices in Japan as well as
a network of overseas subsidiaries in key Asia-Pacific locations.
JAIC manages a total of 65 funds with an aggregate fund size of 151,360 million
yen (US$1.3bn). JAIC is currently listed on the JASDAQ stock exchange. JAIC has
built its business around three geographic hubs in Japan, other parts in Asia (10
countries) and the United States. With a multi-disciplinary team of over 100 investment
professionals, JAIC is able to provide integrated financial services to companies
in various sectors and at various stages of development.
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Asia Online Appoints Kirti Vashee VP of Sales for America's and Europe
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News Release
Tuesday, April 1, 2008 |
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Seasoned IT executive and automated translation technology
visionary Kirti Vashee joins Asia Online.
Industry veteran and statistical machine translation evangelist
to spearhead international sales.
Seasoned IT sales and marketing executive and SMT (statistical machine translation)
evangelist, Kirti Vashee, has joined automated translation technology expert, Asia
Online, as Vice President of Sales for the Americas and Europe.
An industry veteran, Vashee joins Asia Online from SMT pioneer, Language Weaver
where, as Vice President of Sales and Marketing, he was responsible for the company’s
worldwide business development strategy.
Vashee brings extensive enterprise software and information services industries
experience to the company, having held senior sales and product marketing positions
in both small entrepreneurial start-ups that were successfully sold to much larger
public companies, as well as large blue chip organizations, including EMC and Dow
Jones.
Rapid economic growth in Asia, and globalization trends in general, have led to
significant demand by the world's largest companies to bring content, product, and
services to Asian markets. Asia Online is focused on building best-of-breed translation
systems that pair 11 Asian languages with the most widely spoken European languages,
not just to English. Additionally, the next billion Internet users are also largely
expected to be Asian, offering lucrative new markets to Global 2000 companies who
reach out to this new user base. In addition, Asia Online plans to expand its core
Asian language portfolio to include direct translation to/from many key European
languages throughout this year.
By 2012, Asia is expected to account for almost 50% of all Internet users. Asia
Online aims to have more than 48 million new users throughout Asia, who will be
regularly using the Internet in their own languages, for everything from email,
to in-depth research and educationally-focused content.
“It is extremely gratifying that our vision has caught the attention of such a key
industry player. This is a key appointment that will significantly boost our global
sales and marketing push at a pivotal point in our growth,” said Dion Wiggins, Chief
Executive Officer of Asia Online. “Kirti has built an enviable reputation as a thought
leader and visionary in large-scale corporate translation and its role in furthering
international trade and communication. His in-depth understanding of the knowledge
management and translation industries, coupled with his expertise in building worldwide
partnerships, will unquestionably help us to strengthen and build our partner and
customer network.
Vashee has established successful sales operations for several companies in Europe
and the Asia Pacific region, and has extensive experience developing motivated and
effective distribution channels and partner networks. He joined Language Weaver
in 2005 from EMC where, most recently, he was Vice President, Xtender Solutions.
He became part of EMC’s organization when it acquired Smart Storage (Legato), a
company that he was instrumental in building from a five-person start-up to a successful,
globally recognized 125 person organization.
Vashee is a sought-after and accomplished speaker on automated translation technology
at localization and globalization technology focused conferences around the world.
“Asia Online has a tremendously compelling – even world-changing vision. I am excited
to be part of a company whose unique services will enable people to transcend language
as a barrier to knowledge,” said Vashee. “Today, more than 86% of all content on
the Internet is in non-Asian languages. The remaining 14% is mostly Chinese, Japanese
and Korean, with all other Asian language combined accounting for less than 0.03%
of all content online. Asia Online will make a massive amount of new content available
in these under-served languages and quite possibly change the translation landscape
in doing so.”
“Asia Online offers a technology infrastructure that I believe is truly revolutionary
and provides significant productivity increases to its emerging corporate customer
base as this architecture allows their systems to improve with each use and ongoing
corrective feedback. This continuous feedback loop will drive constant quality improvements,
which will encourage and enable massive translation projects that would never otherwise
be undertaken.”
Vashee did his undergraduate work in economics and finance at Bombay University,
India, and received his MBA from Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. He is
an active member of TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs Association www.tie.org).
About Asia Online (www.asiaonline.net)
Asia Online’s unique services enable people to transcend language as a barrier to
knowledge by providing unrivalled access to the limitless store of English-language
content on the Internet, in their language of choice.
Asia Online's primary focus delivers huge amounts of content in local languages.
In doing so it has created a core technological infrastructure that enables massive
translation projects to be undertaken. Asia Online is working with language service
providers and publishers with its unique infrastructure that facilitates the ongoing
evolution of real time corrective improvements that aims to deliver machine translation
quality that is second to none.
Formed in 2006, Asia Online is a privately owned company backed by a number of individual
investors and institutional venture capital. It is headquartered in Singapore, with
operational headquarters in Bangkok, Thailand, from where it conducts R&D and daily
business operations. Asia Online currently employs more than 150 staff and is in
the process of being incorporated in an additional 10 Asian countries.
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Startup Aims to Rapidly Increase Local Content
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Database Section
Wednesday, November 21, 2007 |
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Asia Online set to take Thai language test
DON SAMBANDARAKSA
Ending months of speculation and secretive development, former Gartner vice president
Dion Wiggins has formally unveiled Asia Online, his latest venture into statistical
machine translation (SMT) aimed at bringing the world's content to non-English language
speakers in Asia. And he said he is willing to prove the quality of his system by
offering it free for a major textbook translation project recently announced by
the ICT Ministry.
Speaking at the ICT Forum, Wiggins praised initiatives such as Negroponte's "one
hundred dollar" laptop, Windows XP Starter Edition and Microsoft's Flexgo micropayment
programme for increasing awareness of ICT but warned that this hardware-led view
has seen a shortage of content.
"People talk about the digital divide. They forget the content issue. If you don't
have content then why would you go online?" he asked.
Wiggins claimed that even popular sites such as sanook.com have failed to make the
move into large sale content as it is not a cheap thing to do.
There are less than 10 million web pages in Thailand, a country of 65 million people.
However, Indonesia has less than 500,000 web pages and has 15 times the population
of Thailand, which suggests that most Indonesians use English on the web.
Wiggins said that the next billion Internet users will mostly come from non-English
speakers in emerging markets. The key to tapping into this market is, he believes,
machine translation.
There are two ways to do machine translation. Rule-based translation uses linguists
to come up with rules, but the problem is then that every other sentence is an exception
that breaks the rules.
Statistical Machine Translation is a method that takes two parallel texts, compares
them, and builds up a probability ratio of how likely each word or phrase is to
be translated into another word or phrase. Thus it can learn any pair of languages
if fed enough "parallel copra" or pairs of texts, such as a copy of Harry Potter
in English and another one in Thai.
Wiggins said that a professional translator can charge more than US$100,000 a year
and can translate only 1,500 words a day. However, one PC running Asia Online's
SMT software can translate seven million words a day today and he expects to take
that up to 20 million words a day with further development.
When told that the ICT Ministry had just commenced a 100 million baht book translation
project to expand the knowledge available in Thai, Wiggins immediately offered his
system for the initial translation free of charge, and added that while a typical
book translation can take up to three months, his SMT system can do it in 15 minutes.
By the end of the [next] year, Asia Online expects to have 440 Asian language pairs
available. This also allows for direct translation from, say, Thai to Japanese without
having to go through English first and will even translate between little used languages
like Khmer.
Wiggins noted that Thai did pose a number of unique challenges, as it is one of
the few languages without punctuation and word breaks. Asia Online had to develop
software to correctly break up words and sentences. Asia Online also had to develop
its own optical character recognition algorithm as none of the commercially available
systems were good enough to accurately scan the huge amounts of text needed to learn
the language.
"Automatic translation will dramatically improve citizen's knowledge, education
and the overall economy. Thailand's R&D as a percentage of GDP is one of the
lowest and the number of engineers and scientists per million citizens is also one
of the lowest. Access to knowledge is the way to change that," he said.
Another promising avenue that Asia Online is considering is voice to voice translation.
It has developed a system that converts voice to text, translates that text to another
language with the standard SMT software, and then reconverts that translated text
to voice.
Republished with the kind permission of Bangkok Post
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A Short History of Asia Online
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In mid 2006, ex-Gartner analyst Bob Hayward starts researching opportunities for
new Internet business models in South East Asia based in Bangkok, Thailand. In collaboration
with Gartner analyst Dion Wiggins and locally-based IT/IP legal expert Gregory Binger,
a business model based around the exploitation of newly emerging automated machine
translation technology takes shape.
In late 2006, Dion Wiggins joins Bob in Bangkok working full time on the venture
along with Gregory Binger and a thorough analysis of the leaders in global machine
translation identifies Dr. Philipp Koehn from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland
as a respected expert in this field. Dr. Koehn visits Bangkok and the four founding
members join together to launch the venture and start work on the basic technologies
that underpin Asia Online.
In January 2007, Asia Online gradually starts to bring on board its core team and
during the following months achieves a number of world-first technical innovations,
while remaining in stealth mode.
In July, 2007, Asia Online outgrows its initial office facility and moves into a
large converted house on Bangkok’s Sukhumvit Soi 41.
In September 2007 Asia Online develops the SOCRO solution that delivers extremely
high quality text output from scanned documents in any language and any font. This
is key for many Asian languages today that have very poor OCR capability when compared
to European languages.
In mid-November 2007, as work proceeds to build the most accurate machine translation
technology between Asian and European languages, Asia Online receives a significant
injection of working capital from a number of individual investors.
On November 17th, 2007, Asia Online emerges from stealth mode as CEO Dion Wiggins
makes a presentation at the ICT Forum event held at the Impact arena in Bangkok,
Thailand where Asia Online is publicly revealed for the first time. This is followed
shortly afterwards by the launch of the Asia Online corporate website.
On March 12, 2008, Asia Online CEO Dion Wiggins presented at the LISA (www.lisa.org)
conference in Beijing. This was the companies first public presentation to the linguistic
community and was received well by the audience with a considerable amount of follow
up discussions with many conference attendees. The presentation can be downloaded
from here .
On March 13, the Translation Automation User Society (TAUS) featured Asia Online
as part of its cover page. The article can be seen here.
On April 1, 2008, seasoned IT executive and automated translation technology visionary
Kirti Vashee joined the Asia Online team as Vice President of Sales for the Americas
and Europe. Formerly working for SMT pioneer Language Weaver, Kirti brings extensive
enterprise software and information services industries experience to the company.
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Talking In Tongues
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Database Section
Wednesday, September 19, 2007 |
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A Thailand-based web company wants to create the ultimate translation
tool
Story by DON SAMBANDARAKSA
A web company based in Thailand is hoping to create a tool that allows for the translation
of Asian language texts, including Thai, into any other major language and vice
versa. In doing so, it hopes to make the vast amount of information on the Internet
available to those who cannot read English.
One year ago, Asia Online invited Professor Philipp Koehn from the University of
Edinburgh's School of Informatics to help perfect Statistical Machine Translation
(SMT) for Thai and many other Asian languages. In an exclusive interview, Koehn
explained how SMT first arose as an IBM project in the late 1980s, translating between
French and English.
Instead of the usual rules and grammatical structure, SMT uses statistics through
paring up sentences in each language, called parallel copra, and learning how sentences
are translated. Essentially, the system can learn Thai by feeding it, for example,
copies of Harry Potter in English and the translated Thai versions for it to analyse.
The system works much better than conventional rule-based systems as few languages
have words that map directly to another. "Take the phrase 'interest rate.' Interest
has a lot of different meanings, rate is also an amorphous word that has many meanings,
but interest rate together has a very definite translation. Local context helps
a lot," Koehn explained. Another example is refuse (the verb, meaning turn down)
and refuse (the noun, meaning trash). These give surprisingly few problems.
The challenges lie with different sentence structures. Japanese and German, for
instance, have the verb at the end of the sentence. German also has morphology,
where words merge into huge monster words. A bigger problem is with languages that
leave out information altogether, for instance on tense or omitted subjects or objects
which have to then be gathered from the surrounding sentences.
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Professor Philipp Koehn of the University of Edinburgh
shows of the EuroMatrix, a statistical machine translation (SMT) project used to
translate to and from each of the European Union's languages. Today he is helping
perfect Thai SMT with Asia Online. — DON SAMBANDARAKSA |
Away from his work at Asia Online and the university, Koehn is also working on real-time
voice translation for DARPA, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for
Chinese and Arabic. The system is already deployed in Iraq and has by far the most
mature SMT engine available, with over 200 million parallel copra sentence pairs.
The system starts to work well with 20 million sentence pairs and gives a good result
with 40 million, according to Koehn.
Another project is in the European Union. Its 25 official languages means over 600
language pairs that every document needs to be translated to and from. One benefit
is the high quality of existing legal documents which can be used to train the SMT
engine.
For Thai, one of the unique challenges has been to create a work segmentation pre-processor,
as Thai does not have breaks between words or full stops. Today, Asia Online has
hired fresh graduates from Chulalongkorn University's computational linguistics
programme and is working with researchers from Chulalongkorn, Thammasat, Kasetsart
and NECTEC (the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre).
It also has developed a post-processor that rates the quality of Thai and the automatic
changes are fed back into the SMT learning engine.
The algorithms are relatively advanced. Learning Arabic with 200 million parallel
copra takes around a week on a modern Linux PC with 4GB of memory and a lot of hard
disk space.
Asia Online founder Dion Wiggins explained that while Professor Koehn has been focusing
on the usability and the translation quality as part of his pure research work,
it will be up to Asia Online to architect the algorithms in a way that can scale
to thousands of transactions a second. This will allow users of the Asia Online
portal to view the Internet in any language they wish.
A lot of work can be taken care of in the pre- and post-processing. For instance,
Chinese numbering refers to 52,000 as "five point two ten thousand", which would
need to be translated into "fifty-two thousand" for both English and Thai. Other
engineers are working on a name and place recognition pre-processor that will tag
words that need to be translated phonetically.
Professor Kohen and the Asia Online staff declined to show the quality of Thai translation
just yet, though they promised it would be better than anything else available when
it is formally launched.
Time will tell.
One key improvement of the raw algorithms will be the development of specialised
domains. For instance, language used in car manuals is quite different from legal
documents and from chatrooms. Wiggins said that the system will feature thousands
of domains, which will be one of the unique points of the Asiao Online SMT engine.
For languages with insufficient texts, like Khmer, SMT algorithms can triangulate
with two or more different languages, for instance merging Japanese-Khmer with English-Khmer
parallel copra. This has successfully been used to train SMT systems for Gaelic,
Welsh and Catalan and other "low resource" languages.
The Bible and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights have been very useful as
it has been translated into every major language. For Asia, Wiggins is eyeing the
Buddhist Tripitaka for use to train the engine.
Asked if this would mean that Asia Online will be able to translate into ancient
languages such as Pali, still used widely in Buddhist rituals, and Sanskrit, Wiggins
laughed and said, "Let's get Thai working first."
Republished with the kind permission of Bangkok Post
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