Basis Technology Announces Japanese Morphological Analyzer; Internet Leaders Deploy Japanese Search and Retrieval with JMA

Business Wire, July 12, 2000

Business/Technology Editors

Internet World Chicago 2000

(Booth #1235)

CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 12, 2000

Basis Technology (www.basistech.com), the premier provider of internationalization services and technology, announced today at Internet World the Japanese Morphological Analyzer (JMA), a text analysis and word segmentation engine that enables Japanese search and retrieval. JMA has already been adopted by leading Internet companies including eXcelon Corporation (NASDAQ: EXLN), Google Inc., Lycos, Inc. (NASDAQ: LCOS), Peregrine Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: PRGN) and Ultraseek Corporation (formerly Infoseek Software).

"Japan, the world's second-largest economy, is quickly emerging as the biggest opportunity in global e-commerce," said Carl Hoffman, president and CEO of Basis Technology. "JMA enables US e-businesses and search engines to enter the Japanese market rapidly, with the most advanced language segmentation technology available today."

The Japanese Morphological Analyzer is a robust source code library that addresses the problem of indexing and searching Japanese text, a complex, written language which does not use spaces to separate words. Combined with the industry's most comprehensive Japanese dictionaries, JMA enables e-businesses and search engines to index and search Japanese document repositories, including text fields and databases; generate word lists; create efficient text browsers; and verify consistency between ideographic (kanji) and phonetic (yomi) forms. These capabilities are particularly valuable for Internet search applications, enterprise-wide software applications and for e-businesses establishing direct-to-consumer channels to Asian markets.

"With JMA, we have enabled our customers to engage in dynamic business-to-business e-commerce with Japanese-based partners, suppliers and customers," said Ken Rugg, vice president, product development at eXcelon Corp. "It would have been nearly impossible for us to provide this level of Japanese capability to our product line without the Japanese Morphological Analyzer."

"Congratulations on creating some great technology that enabled our product in a Japanese market," said Fred Luddy, CTO, Peregrine Systems. "Our product author found your technology to be exactly what we needed."

Japanese Morphological Analyzer version 3.0 is currently available for evaluation, and will ship in August. JMA 3.0 is Basis Technology's most accurate, high-performance segmentation engine to date for the Japanese language.

JMA is licensed as a royalty-free software development kit (SDK) or as a source code distribution on all major platforms, including Win32, Solaris, HP-UX, Digital UNIX and Linux. For more information, please visit www.basistech.com or email info@basistech.com.

About Basis Technology

Basis Technology is the leading provider of internationalization technology and services for Internet companies and global enterprises. The company specializes in software re-engineering services for Unicode compliance, and offers a wide range of cross-platform software components that deliver off-the-shelf solutions to problems commonly encountered in internationalization projects.

The company's flagship product, Rosette, is the leading cross-platform library for Unicode, the rapidly emerging international standard for software that handles multiple languages. Top-tier Web software publishers, search engines, and portals have adopted Rosette as the core of their globalization strategy. Basis Technology is the only Web internationalization company that is also a full member of the Unicode Consortium.

Basis Technology's multilingual professionals are veterans of hundreds of software and Web internationalization projects. The company works closely with its customers to maximize the opportunities offered by rapidly expanding global markets.

Company headquarters are located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a branch office in Tokyo, Japan. For more information, visit www.basistech.com or call 617-386-2000.