AppTek

Applications Technology (AppTek) is a U.S. software company specializing in human language technology, headquartered in McLean, Virginia.

Applications Technology (AppTek) is a U.S. 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 many language pairs. Current bidirectional language pairs include English with Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, Persian, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian, and unidirectional pairs from Indonesian, Pashto, Tagalog and Urdu into English. AppTek has been involved in automatic speech recognition since the acquisition of AIXPLAIN, covering broadcast voice and conversational telephony in various languages and dialects. AppTek was founded in 1990 by Mohammad Shihadah and Mudar Yaghi. Acquired in 1998 by Lernout & Hauspie (at the time a NASDAQ publicly traded company), AppTek organized a management buy-out and went private again in 2001.