NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) announced today that it won the 2010 Gold Award for Field Innovation from the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence (*1) for its machine translation technology.

The award is presented to individuals or groups that promote social innovation and practical methods for solving social problems through research and development of artificial intelligence technology.

NEC developed a high-performance translation engine that translates a wide variety of conversational expressions and has been successfully demonstrated through several field trials with users of mobile phones and PDAs (mobile information terminals). In 2001, NEC started Japan’s first multi-lingual mobile phone translation service, “J-SERVER Pocket,” in cooperation with The Kodensha, Co., Ltd. Since that time, NEC has continued to improve the service together with NEC BIGLOBE, Ltd.

J-SERVER Pocket provides mobile phone users with two-way translation services between Japanese and English, Japanese and Korean, and Japanese and Chinese. As the service is available outside of Japan for mobile phones with international roaming, a mobile phone can be helpful as a hand-held translator while traveling overseas. Users of the service can hear translation results by simply using the speech synthesis function. J-SERVER Pocket is registered on the official mobile sites of Japan’s four major mobile phone carriers (*2).

In 1977, Dr. Koji Kobayashi, former chairman of the board of NEC Corporation, declared the new concept of “C&C,” a fusion between computer and communications technologies. Since then, NEC has been developing machine translation technologies in order to break through language barriers.

Looking forward, NEC will continue to advance the research of human language technologies as part of moving towards the realization of a society where open communications are possible anytime, anywhere.

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Notes
*1) The Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence:
For more information, visit http://www.ai-gakkai.or.jp/jsai/english.html

*2) For more information, visit http://www.jserver.com/m/

About NEC Corporation
NEC Corporation is a leader in the integration of IT and network technologies that benefit businesses and people around the world. By providing a combination of products and solutions that cross utilize the company’s experience and global resources, NEC’s advanced technologies meet the complex and ever-changing needs of its customers. NEC brings more than 100 years of expertise in technological innovation to empower people, businesses and society. For more information, visit NEC at http://www.nec.com.

NEC Press Contact (Japan), (APAC)
Kosuke Yamauchi
NEC Corporation
k-yamauchi@ce.jp.nec.com
+81-3-3798-6511 Masako Hirano
NEC Asia Pacific Pte Ltd
m-hirano@nec.com.sg
+65-6379-2570

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NEC Corporation announced today that it won the 2010 Gold Award for Field Innovation.