Basis Technology to Provide Software for Chinese and Japanese Versions of MSN Search; Rosette® Language Analyzers to Support the Expansion of MSN Search into Asian Markets

Business Wire, Dec 6, 2005

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Basis Technology announced today that Microsoft has licensed its Rosette(R) language analyzers for Chinese and Japanese to support the expansion of MSN Search into Asian markets. The Rosette(R) analyzers are software components that enable information retrieval applications and search engines to understand queries and search web pages in foreign languages.

This agreement extends the existing relationship between the two companies. Microsoft has been using Basis Technology's Rosette Linguistic Platform since the launch of the MSN Search beta in late 2004.

"Multilingual search continues to be a top priority for MSN, and our prior success with Basis Technology's software made Rosette the natural choice for our Chinese and Japanese search systems", said Justin Osmer, Product Manager at MSN.

"Asia is the fastest-growing online market in the world. It's shaping up as the most important new battleground among the top search engines," said Carl Hoffman, CEO of Basis Technology. "Boosting multilingual search capabilities is a top priority for global players. We've built our reputation on helping American companies succeed in overseas markets, and we're pleased that our relationship with Microsoft continues to deepen."

The Rosette Linguistics Platform uses advanced natural language processing techniques to enable applications such as unstructured data management, document exploitation, business intelligence and text mining for global markets. Rosette's capabilities include automatic language identification; conversion of documents into Unicode(TM); and identification of names, places, and other key concepts.

About Basis Technology

Basis Technology (www.basistech.com) provides software solutions for multilingual text mining and information retrieval applications. The company's Rosette(R) Linguistics Platform is a suite of high-performance, robust, 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 industry leaders Amazon.com, America Online, Convera, Endeca, Google, Hewlett-Packard, InQuira, L.L Bean, Northrop Grumman, Oracle/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.