Basis Technology to Enhance Multilingual Search in New MSN Search Engine

Basis Technology today announced that Microsoft Corp. has chosen the Rosette Linguistics Platform to support Web searches in its new MSN search engine. The companies have entered into a multi-year agreement in which Microsoft has the option to utilize all of Basis Technology's linguistics software, including components for language identification, morphological analysis, and entity extraction.

"MSN(R) Search aims to deliver fast, relevant search results to consumers all over the world," said Justin Osmer, product manager for MSN Search. "We are happy to work closely with Basis Technology because of their long and distinguished track record in supporting multilingual search."

On Nov. 11, 2004, MSN released a global beta of the improved MSN Search service worldwide. The new MSN Search delivers the information consumers are looking for online faster through a combination of up-to-date resources and search tools that make it possible for consumers to tailor search to their needs.

Rosette performs linguistic analysis that helps information retrieval applications understand search queries. For example, Rosette identifies individual words for languages such as Japanese that do not use spaces between words, breaks compound words into their individual components, and identifies parts-of-speech such as verb, adjective, etc. This information increases the accuracy of search results.

Carl Hoffman, CEO of Basis Technology, said, "Being chosen by Microsoft to support this essential component of their new MSN Search service is very exciting. We're committed to ensuring that MSN Search consumers have an excellent experience regardless of the language they are using."

The Rosette Linguistics Platform uses state of the art Natural Language Processing techniques to improve information retrieval, text mining and other applications and apply them to global markets. Rosette provides capabilities like identifying the language of incoming text, providing a normalized representation in Unicode, and locating names, places and other key concepts.

About Basis Technology

Basis Technology (www.basistech.com) provides software solutions for extracting meaningful intelligence from multilingual text. The company's Rosette(R) Linguistics Platform is a suite of high-performance, highly reliable, interoperable software components designed for applications that analyze and process all the world's languages.

Top-tier software vendors, content providers, multinational enterprises, and government agencies rely on Basis Technology's solutions for Unicode compliance, language identification, multilingual search, normalization, transliteration, and entity extraction. Clients include Amazon.com, America Online, Ask Jeeves, Convera, Endeca, FAST, Hewlett-Packard, L.L Bean, Northrop Grumman, PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems, Software AG, and Verity.

Company headquarters are located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with branch offices in San Francisco, California; Herndon, Virginia; and Tokyo, Japan. For more information, visit www.basistech.com or call 800-697-2062.

Other product and service names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.