Alis Technologies and Verity Offer Multilingual Search and Retrieval

LOS ANGELES -- (BUSINESS WIRE) -- March 13, 1998 -- Alis Technologies Inc., a leader in the field of language-handling technology, and Verity, Inc. (NASDAQ:VRTY), a leading provider of viewing, search, and retrieval applications for the enterprise and the Internet, are offering powerful multilingual search and retrieval of information on intranets and Web sites.

This unites Verity's indexing and search products with Alis' linguistic know-how.

Alis' and Verity's new multilingual search and retrieval technology is an important component of the Alis Translation Solutions, a family of products and services designed to provide the highly tailored and integrated translation solutions that large corporations require. This particular application is designed to allow users to enter a search query in their own language, search content in a different language, and obtain the results in their own language.

The query string itself is automatically translated before performing the search, and the resulting summaries are translated into the language of the query. In the final steps of the search, users are presented with the complete document in the same language as that of their initial query.

"This partnership with Verity directly addresses the need for international companies to provide access to information across a growing span of languages," says Iain Drummond, Vice President, Strategic Partnerships, Alis Technologies Inc. "The addition of the Search Information Server nicely rounds out our Web solution by enabling people to gain full multilingual access to Web documents. By extending queries across different languages, one can obtain a much more complete set of qualified search results."

"Searching for information in collections maintained in different languages is a common requirement among multinationals," says Ron Weissman, Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at Verity. "We believe that the combination of Alis Translation Solutions with our Verity Information Server will offer substantial additional value to our multinational customers. We also believe that it adds significant value to large online information publishers, wishing to offer international users or subscribers access to content stored natively in languages other than their own."

By implementing this capability to search information located anywhere on an intranet or Web site, corporations can streamline their worldwide communications with employees, customers and partners; provide quick access to many types of documents in different languages such as technical manuals (effectively reducing training costs) and benefit from simplified management on a global scale. Online publishers and Web developers can also now provide multilingual access to rapidly changing content.

International Data Corporation predictions '98 state that: "In 1998, among key technologies and products that support the growth of the Web as a marketplace will be Web language translation. The 42% of Web users who reside outside the United States represent the fastest growing part of the Web population. Being multilingual is becoming a fundamental "skill" for any commercial site; this is increasingly true for individual surfers. We predict that in 1998, products and services that support translation of Web content (e.g. from Alis Technologies, Transparent Language, Digital's AltaVista site and others) will become critical tools for the Web community."


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