Re: Scientists Work on Software to Scan Arabic
On 2005-01-28T20:03:22-0500, R.A. Hettinga wrote: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Arabic-Software.html?oref=loginpagewanted=printposition= The New York Times January 27, 2005 Scientists Work on Software to Scan Arabic By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS ``The whole Internet is skewed toward people who speak English,'' said Venu Govindaraju, director of the Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors at the University at Buffalo, where the software is being developed. Someone give that man a brain, and a cookie. I don't live near NY. The internet has nothing to do with scanning written/printed arabic texts. He obviously intended to squeeze a complaint about the internet into an article about scanning printed/written documents. The reason the internet is skewed is because these idiots want others to fix the internet to accommodate their languages. As a result, much of the non-western-language support in software is done by westerners, and so doesn't work. -- War is the father and king of all, and some he shows as gods, others as men; some he makes slaves, others free. --Heraclitus (Kahn.83/D-K.53)
Scientists Work on Software to Scan Arabic
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Arabic-Software.html?oref=loginpagewanted=printposition= The New York Times January 27, 2005 Scientists Work on Software to Scan Arabic By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 8:09 a.m. ET BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) -- Computer scientists are developing software to scan Arabic documents, including handwritten ones, for specific words and phrases, filling a void that became apparent following the Sept. 11. attacks. Besides helping with intelligence gathering, the software should expand access to modern and ancient Arabic manuscripts. It will allow Arabic writings to be digitized and posted on the Web. ``The whole Internet is skewed toward people who speak English,'' said Venu Govindaraju, director of the Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors at the University at Buffalo, where the software is being developed. Govindaraju fears that if optical character recognition software isn't developed for a particular language, ``then all the classic texts in that language will disappear into oblivion.'' Bill Young, an Arab language specialist at the University of Maryland, said the software could help scan through masses of typed pages for specific names or words, though he cautioned that handwritten Arabic presents serious challenges for computers. For instance, the word mas'uul, meaning responsible, can be written in more than one way, he said. So the software would have to be given instructions about possible variations. Govindaraju, who helped develop software to recognize handwritten addresses in English, said the Arabic software would take into account the fact that characters may take different forms depending on where within a word they appear, and that Arabic vowels are pronounced but often not written. -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
Re: Scientists Work on Software to Scan Arabic
On 2005-01-28T20:03:22-0500, R.A. Hettinga wrote: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Arabic-Software.html?oref=loginpagewanted=printposition= The New York Times January 27, 2005 Scientists Work on Software to Scan Arabic By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS ``The whole Internet is skewed toward people who speak English,'' said Venu Govindaraju, director of the Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors at the University at Buffalo, where the software is being developed. Someone give that man a brain, and a cookie. I don't live near NY. The internet has nothing to do with scanning written/printed arabic texts. He obviously intended to squeeze a complaint about the internet into an article about scanning printed/written documents. The reason the internet is skewed is because these idiots want others to fix the internet to accommodate their languages. As a result, much of the non-western-language support in software is done by westerners, and so doesn't work. -- War is the father and king of all, and some he shows as gods, others as men; some he makes slaves, others free. --Heraclitus (Kahn.83/D-K.53)
