AppTek Acquires the Omnifluent Human Language Technology Software and Business from Leidos

MCLEAN, Va., Nov. 5, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Applications Technology LLC ("AppTek") (www.apptek.com), through its founders Mohammad Shihadah and Mudar Yaghi, today announced that it has acquired the Omnifluent Human Language Technology software and related business from Leidos, Inc.  The intellectual property includes automated speech recognition and machine translation software tools that allow for bi-directional and uni-directional language pairs encompassing more than thirty languages and numerous dialects.

AppTek is a pioneer in automatic speech recognition and machine translation technology.  It relies on a highly-skilled team of computational linguists and software engineers to develop and deploy its solutions.  AppTek's innovative, Hybrid Machine Translation engine is a leading-edge breakthrough in language translation technology, fusing rule-based and statistical-based engines.  Applications for the company's machine translation and speech recognition technology include: media monitoring, closed captioning, subtitling, mobile devices and telephony solutions.  AppTek licenses its technology to both government and commercial clients.

According to research firm, Markets and Markets, the natural language processing sector, which includes interactive voice response, speech analytics, machine translation, and dictation technologies, will grow from $3.8 billion in 2013 to $9.9 billion in 2018, representing a compound annual growth rate of 21.1 percent.  "Rapid evolution of the media landscape provides us the opportunity to expand our solution and services to international commercial clients," states Mudar Yaghi, co-CEO of AppTek. 

Mohammad Shihadah, co-CEO of AppTek, further states, "The growth in video and social networking sites has greatly contributed to the amount of unstructured content on the Web.  Our technology can leverage this unstructured data by optimizing lingual response systems."

Seabrook Partners LLC acted as financial advisor to AppTek, while Bingham McCutchen LLP provided legal support.

About Applications Technology - AppTek

Applications Technology ("AppTek") is a U.S.-based software company specializing in human language technology, headquartered in McLean, Virginia.  AppTek's primary focus is on machine translation (MT) and automatic speech recognition (ASR).  Originally using a rule-based engine with a transfer approach (based primarily on Lexical Functional Grammar), AppTek acquired AIXPLAIN in 2004, thereby adding a statistical engine as well. The two engines have since been merged into a hybrid machine translation engine covering more than 30 language pairs and numerous dialects. AppTek has been involved in automatic speech recognition since the acquisition of AIXPLAIN, covering broadcast voice and conversational telephony in various languages and dialects.

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SOURCE AppTek