Exploit Global Knowledge with Cross-Language Semantic Search

  

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Product development has gone global – with products being created, part by part, at manufacturing centers across the globe. Roles and tasks, from manufacturing to R&D, have also become increasingly globally distributed.

The benefits to global product teams are many and include shortening development cycles and costs and bringing R&D personnel closer to the needs of regional markets and closer to distributed manufacturing resources.

But the transition to global product development creates many new challenges for multinational organizations. Companies encounter problems in relation to communication, cultural differences, collaboration, learning and knowledge management, quality, and engineering productivity. Product development activities have to be coordinated and integrated – across timelines, language barriers and global borders - and knowledge and expertise has to be shared in order to drive growth and innovation.

Being a global product company necessitates making use of new types of corporate and organizational knowhow and external content and knowledge.  While English is the most commonly used language in scientific and technological publications, accounting for up to to-thirds of all technical content, at least in initial publication[i], Chinese research now far outpaces the rest of the World. 

Mono-lingual search engines only allow users to submit a search query across documents of the same language.  Goldfire, the optimal decision engine, offers powerful multi-lingual search capabilities that make it possible for product development teams to research across and leverage patents, documents and websites in five languages.

World Class Semantic Search

Powered by world-class semantic search technologies, Goldfire retrieves concise answers to technical and business research questions from internal and external content sources.

Goldfire connects to a wide range of information sources and transforms the underlying data into actionable intelligence. Goldfire becomes a “virtual subject matter expert” by surfacing concepts from hundreds of document types, numerous enterprise applications, technical and deep web sites, worldwide patent literature, consumer sentiment and more.

The intuitive natural language interface supports English, German, French, Japanese and Chinese queries and content, including unique simultaneous cross-language queries and results summarization—a critical benefit since both content and global team communications are often multi-lingual.

With Goldfire, users can mine any authoritative knowledge source internal to their company or available on the Internet regardless of authoring language. And, advanced research tools within Goldfire make it easy to tap into this knowledge, transforming it into actionable intelligence to fuel innovation activities.

Simultaneous Cross-Language Retrieval and Translation

Goldfire translates queries and query results at the semantic level—a strategy that provides greater machine accuracy than available with conventional machine language translators.

Simultaneous cross-language retrieval is supported by Goldfire at two levels—query and results. First, the user types their question in the language of their choice. They can select English, French, German, Japanese or Chinese. Then, behind the scenes, Goldfire simultaneously issues a semantically equivalent query to appropriate content indexes in any or all of the other four supported languages—one query applied five ways. And second, the results; by default the results are returned in the language in which the document is written. The user can also request that Goldfire translate the results into a single common language.

Multi-Lingual Semantic Search Supports Innovation Collaboration

To support a free flow of ideas and facilitate shared problem solving, Goldfire’s collaborative platform makes it much easier for global product teams to collaborate – both passively and actively – with one another and with subject matter experts across the organization.

Product development teams can work together to exploit intellectual property assets across lines of business or collaborate to validate a new technology, material or product capability.  Using Goldfire, engineers – from Boston to Berlin to Beijing – can leverage the ideas and insights of colleagues – even those no longer with the company – by accessing documented lessons learned, designs, technical notes and more in multiple languages.

With Goldfire, cross-functional, cross-geographical and cross-language teams are better connected (based on what they know and need to know) and leveraged. Effective sharing of ‘gray-matter’ expertise is accelerated. And, global problem-solving expertise is automatically captured for reuse across the enterprise.