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IBM Technology Translates Arabic Media Broadcasts to English

IBM has unveiled a technology to translate Arabic media broadcasts into English in near real-time and has licensed the technology to Critical Mention, a real-time television news search and broadcast monitoring service.

Codenamed Translingual Automatic Language Exploitation System (TALES), the IBM technology processes the audio signal from Arabic television and radio stations and translates its spoken content into English text. Once this text is indexed by the CriticalTV platform, Critical Mention’s clients will be able to conduct real-time searches of Arabic media, and receive alerts instantly when a search term is detected.

Under the agreement, IBM Research will provide Critical Mention a multi-year license to its speech-to-text translation solution for Arabic and English sources, with the ability to expand to other languages in the future.

“The ever-shifting nature of the market compels business professionals to quickly and easily monitor a wide range of foreign events and world media,” said Arthur Ciccolo of IBM Research.

The TALES system combines three core technologies, search, speech-to-text conversion, and statistical machine translation. If a user selects a news source and a particular video clip, for example, the spoken words in this foreign language file are converted into written words. Then, TALES translates the written foreign-language text into the native language, English in this case. To provide the accurate results, TALES uses statistical machine translation that employs automatically extracted word-to-word and phrase-to-phrase translations as used by the United Nations’ simultaneous translators. The statistical model for translation improves TALES effectiveness in capturing the meaning of the news it translates.

Critical Mention is adapting the speech-to-text conversion, and statistical machine translation components to integrate with its existing TV search & monitoring platform, CriticalTV, to provide subscribers with real-time monitoring of Arabic TV.


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