SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation) has purchased the assets of AppTek Partners, LLC; Applications Technology, Inc. and Media Mind for an undisclosed sum. Apptek, based in McLean Virginia, has built a base of software and intellectual property in the field of speech recognition and machine translation. It has taken a hybrid approach, initially pursuing a rules-based approach but adding a statistical engine in 2004 by acquiring a company called Aixplain.

AppTek brings bidirectional language pairs that include English with Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, Persian, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian, and unidirectional pairs from Indonesian, Pashto, Tagalog and Urdu into English. SAIC expects its acquired technology and assets to strengthen its efforts to deliver language services to the intelligence, defense and law enforcement communities. This complements SAIC’s portfolio of translation products that already spanned 70 languages.

SAIC is part of the Fortune 500 with over 45,000 employees. At various points in its evolution, it owned Network Solutions, which manages the DNS (Domain Name Server) that houses the majority of popular Web addresses (.com, .net, .org, .edu, for example). It has owned Bellcore and Telcordia – professional service providers that also manage the library of software and support materials that power all of the electronic switches and ancillary processors that conform to “Bell spec”.

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Tags: Speech recognition, Machine Translation, SAIC