Meedan
Encyclopedia
Meedan is a non-profit social technology company which aims to increase cross-language interaction on the web, with particular emphasis on translation and aggregation services in Arabic and English
. Through its use of Machine Translation
(MT), Machine Augmented Translation (MAT), and distributed human translation, Meedan’s goal is to increase dialogue and exchange between Arabic and English speakers primarily by launching a cross-language forum for conversation and media sharing. This service will be designed to stand as “a digital gathering place for a linguistically, culturally, and geographically diverse community of Arabic and English speaking Internet users”.
, and Hanan Heakal, Senior Human Resources Manager at Procter & Gamble
in Cairo
, Egypt
.
’ in Arabic – sees “dialogue and collaboration” as the key to creating “understanding and tolerance” between the Arab and Western worlds. A fundamental premise of the organization is that social technology
on the web can play a part in enabling citizen-to-citizen diplomacy
between the peoples of Arab and Western countries, thereby helping to improve cross-cultural understanding. Meedan’s vision is thus to “innovate technologies that enable dialogues across linguistic, cultural, and ideological boundaries”. The company describes itself as “multi-cultural, non-partisan, non-ideological, and supportive of diverse viewpoints”.
in Arabic and English. Users can browse aggregated sources around world events – blogs and mainstream sources; opinion and reporting; Arabic and English writing – and help expand the news narrative by posting articles and comments themselves. All sources and comments are mirrored across Arabic and English using a combination of machine and human translation. Users can also make friends with other users and upload their profile to their My Meedan page.
with which it entered into a research partnership in 2006. Development has focused on Machine and Machine Augmented Translation tools that enable users to improve translations collaboratively, including IBM’s Transbrowser – a browser tool for creating a translation layer on the web. Perhaps most significantly, Meedan is open licensing the linguistic data generated from its efforts. Improved translation automation and augmentation has profound implications in global media, education, and business and information services; Meedan hopes to play a small part by leading an effort to steer the global computational linguistics community to embrace open licensing of linguistic corpora. Meedan aims to contribute to the Arabic English linguistic corpus, and therefore improve MT quality, by providing translation services to individuals and partner organizations. Meedan is especially interested in advancing progress in the under served direction of source English to target Arabic Machine Translation.
. With a large linguistic corpus and overseen by a staff of over 20 professional translators, Meedan’s translations are more likely to be accurate in both their grammar and meaning. Moreover, Meedan’s users can edit and improve translations themselves. These improved translations are then stored on the Machine Translation software to be used in the same context in the future. Thus, as more users participate in conversations and help broaden the machine translation’s ‘vocabulary’, so the potential errors of Machine Translation should be reduced.
The dependence on human translators to enhance the quality of the translation is not free of problems. Besides syntactic and semantic factors there are factors of style and aesthetics of the target language. While many so-called professional translators could produce comprehensible text of higher quality than machine translation, the quality of the text in the target language is difficult to asses. Awkward or unfluent texts, when admitted in the system, may establish norms and frame of reference that don't serve the purpose of enhancing the overall quality of translation, and an example for translators, or aspiring translators to imitate. This, however, is arguably outside of the scope of the project.
, the philanthropic arm of HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal's Kingdom Holding Company
. The committee is intended to expand Meedan's reach and credibility in the Middle East
.
Meedan has received more than $3.2 million in research and development support from IBM
to further the development of its Arabic-English Automated Translation technology and to support Meedan’s ongoing work on “a social media sharing platform bridging the Arabic and English speaking communities”. Other technology partners include, dotSUB, GeoCommons, MakerLab, Carrot Search, and Rylander Design.
In addition, Meedan has a number of social network partners:
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
. Through its use of Machine Translation
Machine translation
Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of computer software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another.On a basic...
(MT), Machine Augmented Translation (MAT), and distributed human translation, Meedan’s goal is to increase dialogue and exchange between Arabic and English speakers primarily by launching a cross-language forum for conversation and media sharing. This service will be designed to stand as “a digital gathering place for a linguistically, culturally, and geographically diverse community of Arabic and English speaking Internet users”.
Background
Meedan was founded by Ed Bice in 2005 and incorporated as a nonprofit charitable organization in 2006. Bice, who was formerly Executive Director of The People's Opinion Project, remains CEO with a board comprising Jon Corshen, President of GoingOn Technologies, a social media company for onDemand software, Adnan Hassan, Chairman and CEO of Mecasa Advisors and a former senior adviser at the World BankWorld Bank
The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans to developing countries for capital programmes.The World Bank's official goal is the reduction of poverty...
, and Hanan Heakal, Senior Human Resources Manager at Procter & Gamble
Procter & Gamble
Procter & Gamble is a Fortune 500 American multinational corporation headquartered in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio and manufactures a wide range of consumer goods....
in Cairo
Cairo
Cairo , is the capital of Egypt and the largest city in the Arab world and Africa, and the 16th largest metropolitan area in the world. Nicknamed "The City of a Thousand Minarets" for its preponderance of Islamic architecture, Cairo has long been a centre of the region's political and cultural life...
, Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
.
Vision and Aims
Meedan – whose name means ‘gathering place’ or ‘town squareTown square
A town square is an open public space commonly found in the heart of a traditional town used for community gatherings. Other names for town square are civic center, city square, urban square, market square, public square, and town green.Most town squares are hardscapes suitable for open markets,...
’ in Arabic – sees “dialogue and collaboration” as the key to creating “understanding and tolerance” between the Arab and Western worlds. A fundamental premise of the organization is that social technology
Social technology
The term Social Technology was first used at the University of Chicago by Albion Woodbury Small and Charles Richmond Henderson around the end of the 19th century. Small and Henderson were close colleagues, and it is hard to tell who used the term first...
on the web can play a part in enabling citizen-to-citizen diplomacy
Citizen diplomacy
Citizen diplomacy is the political concept of average citizens engaging as representatives of a country or cause either inadvertently or by design. Citizen diplomacy may take place when official channels are not reliable or desirable; for instance, if two countries do not formally recognize each...
between the peoples of Arab and Western countries, thereby helping to improve cross-cultural understanding. Meedan’s vision is thus to “innovate technologies that enable dialogues across linguistic, cultural, and ideological boundaries”. The company describes itself as “multi-cultural, non-partisan, non-ideological, and supportive of diverse viewpoints”.
Dialogue platform
Meedan’s core product is a forum for cross-language conversation and media sharingMedia sharing
Media sharing occurs through online social networks and digital communities with a comprehensive platform and diversified interfaces to aggregate, upload, compress, host and distribute images, text, applications, videos, audio, games and new media. As media is shared it takes on a variety of...
in Arabic and English. Users can browse aggregated sources around world events – blogs and mainstream sources; opinion and reporting; Arabic and English writing – and help expand the news narrative by posting articles and comments themselves. All sources and comments are mirrored across Arabic and English using a combination of machine and human translation. Users can also make friends with other users and upload their profile to their My Meedan page.
Translation
Meedan’s translation technology has been developed in collaboration with The Watson Research Group at IBMIBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
with which it entered into a research partnership in 2006. Development has focused on Machine and Machine Augmented Translation tools that enable users to improve translations collaboratively, including IBM’s Transbrowser – a browser tool for creating a translation layer on the web. Perhaps most significantly, Meedan is open licensing the linguistic data generated from its efforts. Improved translation automation and augmentation has profound implications in global media, education, and business and information services; Meedan hopes to play a small part by leading an effort to steer the global computational linguistics community to embrace open licensing of linguistic corpora. Meedan aims to contribute to the Arabic English linguistic corpus, and therefore improve MT quality, by providing translation services to individuals and partner organizations. Meedan is especially interested in advancing progress in the under served direction of source English to target Arabic Machine Translation.
Mapping
Meedan is in partnership with GeoCommons to develop mapping techniques for emerging events with a view to demonstrating location relations between events and their associated objects on the web (articles, urls, social networks). Meedan is also working on Arabic tiling for maps using open layers.Translation
Machine Translation is often considered to be unreliable in rendering correct “context-dependent meanings” as well as coherent and grammatically correct sentences (particularly when dealing with languages, such as Arabic and English, with very different sentence structures). Meedan’s software, however, appears to be more than mere Machine TranslationMachine translation
Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of computer software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another.On a basic...
. With a large linguistic corpus and overseen by a staff of over 20 professional translators, Meedan’s translations are more likely to be accurate in both their grammar and meaning. Moreover, Meedan’s users can edit and improve translations themselves. These improved translations are then stored on the Machine Translation software to be used in the same context in the future. Thus, as more users participate in conversations and help broaden the machine translation’s ‘vocabulary’, so the potential errors of Machine Translation should be reduced.
The dependence on human translators to enhance the quality of the translation is not free of problems. Besides syntactic and semantic factors there are factors of style and aesthetics of the target language. While many so-called professional translators could produce comprehensible text of higher quality than machine translation, the quality of the text in the target language is difficult to asses. Awkward or unfluent texts, when admitted in the system, may establish norms and frame of reference that don't serve the purpose of enhancing the overall quality of translation, and an example for translators, or aspiring translators to imitate. This, however, is arguably outside of the scope of the project.
Steering Committee
Meedan's Steering Committee was established in October 2008 to serve as a high level advisory panel for the project. Members include: the Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Dr. Ismail Serageldin; Dr Sabri Saidam, minister of telecoms and IT for the Palestinian Authority serving in the ninth Palestinian cabinet; Dr Osama El Ansari, former Chairman of the Board of Trustees for the Network of Syrian Scientists, Technologists and Innovators Abroad (NOSSTIA); and prominent media personality Muna Abu Sulayman, Executive Director of the Alwaleed Bin Talal FoundationAlwaleed Bin Talal Foundation
The Alwaleed Bin Talal Foundation is a charitable and philanthropic organization founded by Al-Waleed bin Talal and Princess Ameerah with a mission to help alleviate suffering and transcend international borders globally. The foundation, under Prince Alwaleed, has established centers and programs...
, the philanthropic arm of HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal's Kingdom Holding Company
Kingdom Holding Company
Kingdom Holding Company is a public holding company headquartered in Kingdom Centre in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and is the largest company in Saudi Arabia. It is controlled by Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz, and is headquartered in the city of Riyadh...
. The committee is intended to expand Meedan's reach and credibility in the Middle East
Middle East
The Middle East is a region that encompasses Western Asia and Northern Africa. It is often used as a synonym for Near East, in opposition to Far East...
.
Funding and Research Partnerships
Meedan’s funding partners include- The Coexist Foundation
- Cisco SystemsCisco SystemsCisco Systems, Inc. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Jose, California, United States, that designs and sells consumer electronics, networking, voice, and communications technology and services. Cisco has more than 70,000 employees and annual revenue of US$...
Foundation - Qatar Foundation International
- Doris Duke Charitable Foundation
- Flora FamilyFlora familyThe Flora family of asteroids is a large grouping of S-type asteroids in the inner main belt, whose origin and properties are relatively poorly understood at present...
Foundation - Nathan Cummings FoundationNathan Cummings FoundationThe Nathan Cummings Foundation was endowed by Nathan Cummings , founder of Consolidated Foods, now called Sara Lee Corporation...
- Rockefeller Brothers FundRockefeller Brothers FundThe Rockefeller Brothers Fund , , is an international philanthropic organisation created and run by members of the Rockefeller family. It was set up in New York City in 1940 as the primary philanthropic vehicle of the five famous Rockefeller brothers: John D...
.
Meedan has received more than $3.2 million in research and development support from IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
to further the development of its Arabic-English Automated Translation technology and to support Meedan’s ongoing work on “a social media sharing platform bridging the Arabic and English speaking communities”. Other technology partners include, dotSUB, GeoCommons, MakerLab, Carrot Search, and Rylander Design.
In addition, Meedan has a number of social network partners:
- Arab Community Center for Economic and Social ServicesArab Community Center for Economic and Social ServicesThe Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services is a human services organization committed to the development of the Arab American community in all aspects of economic and cultural life. ACCESS helps low-income families, as well as newly arrived immigrants adapt to life in the United...
(ACCESS) - C-100 World Economic Forum
- Cairo UniversityCairo UniversityCairo University is a public university located in Giza, Egypt.The university was founded on December 21, 1908, as the result of an effort to establish a national center for educational thought...
- IEARNIEARNiEARN is a non-profit organization made up of over 30,000 schools and youth organizations in more than 125 countries. iEARN supports teachers and young people to work together online using the Internet and other new communications technologies...
(International Education and Resources Network) - Human Rights WatchHuman Rights WatchHuman Rights Watch is an international non-governmental organization that conducts research and advocacy on human rights. Its headquarters are in New York City and it has offices in Berlin, Beirut, Brussels, Chicago, Geneva, Johannesburg, London, Los Angeles, Moscow, Paris, San Francisco, Tokyo,...
- New York UniversityNew York UniversityNew York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
, Center for Dialogues: Islamic World – the West – U.S. - Search for Common Ground: Partners in Humanity News Service
- Teachers Without BordersTeachers Without BordersTeachers Without Borders is an international non-profit organization that provides resources, tools and training to enhance the knowledge, skills, and connectivity of teachers around the world....
- SoliyaSoliyaSoliya is a nonprofit organization that uses internet technology to improve inter-cultural understanding between the "West" and the "Muslim World". Their core program is the Connect Program - a cross-cultural education program that directly connects university students in the US, Europe, Middle...