OpenLogos 1.0.1 review

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OpenLogos project is a large and powerful machine translation system that supports German and English as source languages and major E

License: GPL (GNU General Public License)
File size: 7540K
Developer: Dr Walter Kasper
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OpenLogos project is a large and powerful machine translation system that supports German and English as source languages and major European languages such as French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese as target languages. Additional language pairs are in development.

The LOGOS Machine translation system is one of the largest and most powerful among the commercial machine translation systems. Various text documents in different formats can be submitted to the system and within a short amount of time are translated into different target languages.

The result, a raw translation, is already of high language quality. But if required, the result can be post-edited by a human translator. The user saves a significant amount of time and costs especially since the use of different document filters maintain the format of the original document to a high degree.

Currently German and English are the source languages available. The target languages for English include the major European languages (such as French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese). Additional language pairs are in development.

The system "can learn" in the sense that a trained user quickly is able to maintain terminology and dictionaries and can also establish his own user dictionary. This is important if the text to be translated belongs to a subject area with specific terminology.

The system already has a complex hierarchical system of specialized dictionaries easily accessible for the user. Therefore, from its approach, the LOGOS engine is a "universal problem solving machine" which can process any text in any subject area. "Fine-tuning" or "specialization" is accomplished with the appropriate terminology work.

The LOGOS system had been developed over 30 years to its present form. It requires enormous efforts and resources to develop such a system and extend it, e.g. to new languages. This has the effect that translation systems for smaller languages are commercially less attractive and therefore often are neglected. The availability of the LOGOS system as open source can change this situation:

The LOGOS engine provides a general platform and base system for integrating language specific resources. This spares the effort of developing own base systems from scratch.

The open source nature makes it possible to further develop and improve the base system in an open community process in which everybody can participate and from which all can profit.

The effort of building new translation systems for new language pairs is substantially reduced.

Scientifically, a large high-quality, open domain translation system can boost further development of MT systems e.g. by providing evaluation base lines for new directions and approaches. LOGOS provides the necessary large-scale coverage for such use.

The availability of source code allows integration of new modules and components into the overall system and to combine it with other software systems in more innovative ways than in an black box manner. Especially, combining the fine-grained linguistic information contained in large-scale high-quality rule-based MT-systems with powerful statistical technologies which evolved over the last years appears as an attractive option under such an approach.

What's New in This Release:
This version was ported from Windows and Oracle to Linux and PostgreSQL.

OpenLogos 1.0.1 keywords