Microsoft Research has launched the beta version of WikiBhasha, a multilingual content creation tool for Wikipedia. The WikiBhasha tool enables contributors to Wikipedia to find content from other Wikipedia articles, translate the content into other languages, and then either compose new articles or enhance existing articles in multilingual Wikipedias.
The WikiBhasha beta is available as an open source MediaWiki extension, under the Apache Licence 2.0 and as a user gadget in Wikipedia. The tool is also available as an installable bookmarklet, which is hosted on the Windows Azure platform from Microsoft Corp.
WikiBhasha will support content creation in more than 30 languages. The beta version of WikiBhasha will enable easy content creation in non-English Wikipedias by leveraging the large volume of English Wikipedia content as the source of information. Initially, the Wikimedia Foundation and Microsoft Research will also work closely with the Wikipedia user communities focussing on content creation in Arabic, German, Hindi, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish.
"We are always happy to see work on improving multilingual collaboration between wikis," said Danese Cooper, CTO, the Wikimedia Foundation. "Microsoft Research is doing some interesting work with WikiBhasha, and we are very pleased that it chose to share its client code in open source as well."
"The WikiBhasha beta holds the promise of enabling easy creation of content in multiple languages, and also of generating a large body of parallel language data for researchers to work on to further machine translation technology," said P. Anandan, Managing Director, Microsoft Research India. "Creating quality content in multiple languages can be greatly improved and accelerated with the active participation of the Wikipedia communities."
The WikiBhasha beta is a browser-based tool that works on Wikipedia sites. It features an intuitive and simple user interface (UI) layer that stays on the target-language Wikipedia for the entire content creation process. The WikiBhasha beta currently works on Windows Internet Explorer (7.0 and 8.0) on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7, and on Firefox (3.5 or above) on Linux Fedora (11 and 12), Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.
WikiBhasha, which is supported by Microsoft’s Machine Translation system and Microsoft's Collaborative Translations Framework, was conceptualized by the Multilingual Systems Group at Microsoft Research India. The Multilingual Systems Group explores multilingual and cross-language technologies that work seamlessly across languages, and in creation of resources for aiding computational linguistics research. The tool was developed in collaboration with the Natural Language Processing Group in Microsoft Research Redmond.
