November 20, 1998.

RUSSIAN STATE STANDARDS AND ISO STANDARDS SHAKE HANDS.

ABBYY and PROMT declared about the signing of the contracts with the American company GMCS, on taking part in the Russian State Standards (GOST) normalization. Bringing Russian standards into accord with the international ISO system is the key requirement for Russia to join the World-wide Trade Organization (WTO). The project is backed by World Bank.

In the course of the project the synchronized database of the GOST and ISO standards will be created, which will contain document images, results of their recognition and corresponding translations.

At the first stage the standards are input in the computer. The total number of standards to be scanned and recognized is 3813 Russian and 1892 international standards, i.e. 90303 pages. ABBYY develops a Lotus Notes 4.6 Domino database and the technology of its filling. For document recognition FineReader 4.0 Professional will be used; it will be tuned for automatic interaction with the database.

At the next stage of the project the GOST standards are translated into English, and the ISO standards û into Russian. In less than a year about 100,000 pages in 38 kinds of business should be translated. To translate such an amount of documents in a short time, the machine translation technology will be used. The technology was developed by PROMT (http://www.promt.ru) and implemented in its popular translation systems PROMT. Within the bounds of the project PROMT will create facilities for automatic translation of standards (automatic working place of the translator) and will adapt their systems to carry out these tasks. In particular, more than a million of lexemes will be added to specialized dictionaries of the machine translation system. Automatic working place of the translator will also include the system of electronic dictionaries Lingvo to allow convenient search of words and word combinations translation.

The final part of the project includes creation of a technological complex to input new data from different media and to translate automatically these data from one language into another.

Michail Kanichev, the commercial manager of PROMT: ½We are always interested in solving the problems of translation of large amounts of special documents, and not only because they clearly demonstrate the potential of the machine translation technologies, but also because they give us priceless information about how to use our technologies correctly, and what else we need to do to increase the effectiveness of the use of our systems. Right now we can guarantee that all the obtained experience will be taken into consideration in the following versions of the machine translation system PROMT.╗

Aram Pakhchanyan, the head of the corporate projects and integration of technology  service of ABBYY: ½àThe scheme is the following: a person inserts the document in the scanner, clicks the button, and the database gets the image file, the text of the document and its translation (!). We think that these complexes are very promising. They do the routine work when processing a large amount of information which usually takes the human 90% of time╗.

Further information:
Information Service, ABBYY:
+7 095 234 4400, +7 095 263 6659, fax +7 095 263 6278

ABBYY specializes in development of software for linguistics, semantics, electronic lexicography, and optical character recognition. The results of a company survey by Dator agency since 1995 placed ABBYY among the three most professional software development firms in Russia, and in 1997 ABBYY the first system and applied software in Russia.

ABBYYÆs products include: the FINE READER line of OCR/ICR/OMR software that allows the automatic input of texts, tables, forms into computer, FINE READER TOOLKIT that allows developers to integrate OCR into their solutions; LINGVO CORRECTOR 11 language spell checker; LINGVO - English-Russian/Russian-English electronic dictionaries; LINGVO MORPHOLOGY and LINGVO FULLTEXT RETRIEVAL - 7 language full-text and fuzzy retrieval system, index and search system LINGVO INTERNET INDEX SERVER, etc.

Trademark References: ABBYY, BIT Software, Lingvo, FineReader, Scan&Read, Scan&Translate are registered trademarks and DOCFLOW, Try&Buy are trademarks of ABBYY - BIT Software. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.