Asia Online is a privately owned company backed by individual investors and institutional venture capital. Its corporate headquarters are in Singapore, and it has significant operations in Bangkok, Thailand, with R&D activities throughout Asia and expanding sales operations in Europe and North America.
Asia Online is undertaking what it calls the world's largest literacy project by translating vast quantities of the worlds English language knowledge into Asian languages. This is achieved using statistical machine translation (SMT) technologies developed and enhanced in Thailand with a specific focus on Asian languages. Despite the name, Asia Online is not limited to just Asian languages and also supports all 23 official EU languages across each other.
It was founded in 2007 by the University of Edinburgh's Philipp Koehn, Gregory Binger a leading technologist and IT/IP lawyer, and former Gartner senior analysts Bob Hayward and Dion Wiggins.
Asia Online’s statistically based translation software is an instance of recent advances in automated translation. Until the early 1990s, almost all production-level machine translation technology relied on collections of linguistic rules to analyze the source sentence, and then map the syntactic and semantic structure into the target language. Asia Online uses statistical techniques from cryptography, applying machine learning algorithms that automatically acquire statistical models from existing parallel collections of human translations, in the same way as Google Translate and the systems made using Koehn's own open source Moses tool for SMT.
Read more about Asia Online: Portal Initiatives, Differences From Other Approaches, Supported Languages
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