Lingenio's IntelliDict technology features context-sensitive search

Heidelberg, April 2005

The use of electronic dictionaries may well be revolutionized by the introduction of context-sensitive searches for dictionary lookups. Lingenio, a company based in Heidelberg, Germany, has coined its new technology "IntelliDict" to emphasize the intelligent behavior displayed by its new product, the office dictionary series.

An electronic dictionary facilitates looking up a word with a mouse click. However, a flood of corresponding entries can drown a person in information, resulting in uncertainty as to the needed translation. This is where the IntelliDict technology comes into play. Rather than just looking at a single word that has been selected in a text, it analyzes the whole sentence in which the word appears, making use of extended linguistic and lexical data to arrive at precisely the meaning and the translation that will fit the given context.

As a leading German manufacturer of machine translation software, Lingenio had the idea to employ its proven technology, as well as its large dictionaries with detailed information on grammar, semantics, and translation conditions, to develop what it believes to be a new generation of electronic dictionaries. Because of the grammatical analysis functions, not only the intended meanings of ambiguous words are found, but also terms consisting of more than one word, phrasal verbs, and idioms. Thus, looking up words in the office dictionary series is not only easy, but, more importantly, the results are reliable.

Lingenio has published office dictionaries for German/English and for German/French in cooperation with its partner, digital publishing AG, Munich, known for its language learning software.

Lingenio was founded in 1999 by a group of former IBM employees who had developed Personal Translator, a machine translation product that won the European IST (Information Society Technologies) Prize in 1996 for its innovative technology, and had been the German market leader for many years. In 2004, Lingenio started its cooperation with digital publishing; the companies launched the new machine translation product Translate in June 2004, and now, the office dictionary series.

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