BASIS TECHNOLOGY ANNOUNCES GENERAL AVAILABILITY OF CHINESE TO CHINESE SCRIPT CONVERTER

—  Expands Product Suite Designed to Help Technology Providers Penetrate Chinese Market  —

Cambridge, MA, April 9, 2002—Basis Technology (www.basistech.com), a leading provider of globalization solutions, today announced the general availability of the company’s Chinese Script Converter (C2C). C2C enables automatic translation between the two forms of Chinese: the Simplified form used in mainland China and Singapore, and the Traditional form used in Hong Kong and Taiwan. C2C joins Basis Technology’s popular Chinese Morphological Analyzer to round out a software suite developed for software and service providers looking to penetrate the recently opened Chinese market.

Basis Technology’s C2C product is designed for any software application that needs to process input text in both forms of the Chinese language. It allows users to interact in their preferred form, greatly enhancing the user experience. C2C is ideal for large-scale, text-heavy applications such as search and retrieval, translation, document management, and data warehousing.

Built upon Basis Technology’s leading Chinese text segmentation engine, C2C provides highly accurate translations in real time. These conversions are linguistically sophisticated, requiring accurate text segmentation to determine the words present, and correct mapping of the characters used to represent those words in each script. This process is particularly challenging because many Simplified Chinese characters can map into one of several Traditional Chinese characters, depending on context.

“If a script converter does not map to the correct Traditional Chinese character, documents relevant to an input query may fail to be returned to the user,”explained Tom Emerson, senior computational linguist with Basis Technology. “In order to solve this problem, we went beyond simple character for character substitution. Instead, we convert at the orthographic and lexemic levels because this results in a much more accurate translation. This not only provides the most comfortable user experience, but also ensures that applications incorporating our technology bring back every possible document that matches an input query. This type of accuracy is critical in order for technology providers to offer a product that is fully usable across China, especially as more and more business is conducted between China and Taiwan.”

China’s recent accession agreement with the World Trade Organization (WTO), and its associated membership in the Information Technology Agreement (ITA), have garnered the attention of software and service providers looking to deliver products to a more open Chinese market.

“The Chinese e-commerce market is booming right now, and many global software and service providers are seizing the opportunity to grow there,”said Steve McClure, program vice president with IDC’s software research group. “By enabling applications to support both forms of Chinese in a way that is transparent to users, Basis Technology’s C2C product can help these companies take full advantage of what IDC predicts will be a 248 billion dollar market by 2006.”

“Our Chinese to Chinese Script Converter and our Chinese Morphological Analyzer are getting a tremendous amount of attention,” said Steve Cohen, executive vice president of Basis Technology. “As we announced today, Google is using our C2C product to enhance its pan-Chinese search engine. In addition, some of the world’s most prestigious companies have either implemented these products or are in the process of integrating them into their offerings.”

Basis Technology provides a suite of text processing and language analysis products to answer the needs of anyone needing to parse, search, or categorize the world’s languages. Developers integrate Basis Technology’s products into their own technology through flexible and concise interfaces.

About Basis Technology

Basis Technology (www.basistech.com) provides software solutions for extracting meaningful intelligence from multilingual text. The company’s Rosette® 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 America Online, Convera, Endeca, Google, Hewlett-Packard, InQuira, Inktomi, L.L Bean, Northrop Grumman, PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems, Verity and Yahoo!.

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.