eBay’s focus on international expansion continues: yesterday its PayPal division announced PassPort, aimed at attracting more international sales, and today eBay is announcing the acquisition of machine translation technology from a company called AppTek. From our understanding, eBay is acquiring the talent and the IP from Virginia-headquartered AppTek, but another division of its business focused on voice technology will continue on, possibly still under the AppTek name. However, those specifics are still to be determined.
Eight people from AppTek’s 10-person team will join eBay, including one co-founder. (The other will remain with AppTek to run the remaining business unit.) In the near term, eBay will continue to serve AppTek’s customers, largely government contracts, by licensing the technology.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
AppTek was founded in 1990 by Mohammad Shihadah and Mudar Yaghi, and in more recent years had been developing hybrid machine translation software, which will help eBay improve upon its own in-house machine translation capabilities it began working on two years ago. More.
See: TechCrunch
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Ireland
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Spanish to English
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... with Alibaba-style junk.
Netherlands
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Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
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...with Alibaba-style junk.
More polluted or less polluted? What MT system did eBay use before they started using AppTek's Omnifluent? If they previously used Bing or Google Translate, then Omnifluent is bound to result in better translations, because Omnifluent is a hybrid rule-based system, whereas Bing and Google Translate are pure statistical translators.
United States
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AppTek's patent-pending hybrid machine translation (MT) technology uses statistical machine learning analysis with lexicon and grammar rules into a single decision engine that instantly delivers superior machine translation. The statistical machine translation platform is integrated at all levels of the process with a fully functional rule-based MT system. The Hybrid Machine Translation provides both fluent and accurate translation which has pushed the state-of-the-art ... See more
AppTek's patent-pending hybrid machine translation (MT) technology uses statistical machine learning analysis with lexicon and grammar rules into a single decision engine that instantly delivers superior machine translation. The statistical machine translation platform is integrated at all levels of the process with a fully functional rule-based MT system. The Hybrid Machine Translation provides both fluent and accurate translation which has pushed the state-of-the-art to much higher levels. ▲ Collapse
Local time: 15:43
Chinese to English
... with "Buyee" on Yahoo! Auctions Japan, for instance. The value-add is debatable though...
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