Microsoft Research in collaboration with Wikipedia has introduced the beta version of WikiBhasha, a multilingual content creation tool for Wikipedia.
The WikiBhasha allows 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.
Microsoft said that the WikiBhasha will support content creation in more than 30 languages and the beta version will enable content creation in non-English Wikipedias by leveraging the 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 focusing on content creation in Arabic, German, Hindi, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish.
Microsoft Research India managing director Anandan said 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.
"Creating quality content in multiple languages can be greatly improved and accelerated with the active participation of the Wikipedia communities," Anandan said.
The WikiBhasha beta, a browser-based tool, works on Wikipedia sites and features an user interface (UI) layer that stays on the target-language Wikipedia for the entire content creation process.
The company said that 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.
