Oki Releases Yakushite.Net, a Web-based Machine Translation Environment Enabling Improvement in Translation Quality

Tokyo, Japan, September 29, 2004 -- Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd. (TSE: 6703) today announced that it has successfully developed Yakushite.Net, a Web-based machine translation environment that enables increased translation precision by letting users register their own dictionary data. This Internet machine-translation portal site is available to the general public for use free of charge, starting today. (http://yakushite.net/)

In order to offer a highly precise Web-based machine translation system, it is vital to increase the availability of dictionaries and to constantly manage these dictionaries. On this site, preparation and management of dictionaries is conducted for each field of translation, making it possible for users well versed in a particular field, to construct highly precise dictionaries specific to their field by registering dictionary data. In addition, Oki has developed and incorporated new technology to this site- the specialized terminology extraction function - which uses statistical methods to automatically detect any terms and idioms in documents that should be registered to dictionaries, such as specialized terminology.

"Yakushite.Net represents a highly efficient method of registering dictionary data with its new technology to extract terms and idioms from a Web page, and register terms simply by entering the corresponding translated term," said Harushige Sugimoto, Senior Vice President of Oki Electric. "We provide this site as a translation portal site where users well versed in each field can construct highly precise dictionaries for their own fields by registering dictionary data."

Oki has already evaluated the effectiveness of dictionary registration using the specialized terminology extraction function of Yakushite.Net. Results reveal that 30% of all of the terms and idioms extracted were ones whose registration to dictionaries would increase translation precision, covering 50% of the terms that should be registered. The results also showed that it takes half the time to register a dictionary data when the specialized terminology extraction function is in use over cases in which the function was not used.

Oki endeavors continuous modifications to the site with the aim of increasing user convenience, and thus attract more users to adopt it as their translation portal. In addition, Oki Electric aims to amass the know-how related to language usage and to develop products using natural language processing technologies used in fields such as machine translation and text mining.

About Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd.
Founded more than a century ago in 1881, Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd. is Japan's first telecommunications manufacturer, with its headquarter in Tokyo, Japan. With the corporate vision, "Oki, Network Solutions for a Global Society," Oki Electric provides top-quality products, technologies and solutions to its customers through its telecommunications systems, information systems and electronic devices segments. All three segments are integrated into one effective organization that functions as a collective force to create exciting new products and technologies, including information and telecom converged solutions. Through its business activities, Oki Electric satisfies a spectrum of customer needs in various markets.

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