Automatic Language Identification

To: Patent Issues mailing list

(this was Bcc'd to w3c-wai-er-ig@w3.org, w3c-wai-au@w3.org, 
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cross-posting if there are any responses. )

This is to to inform you of a patent that may be pertinent to w3c work, 
e.g. web accessibility evaluation tools.  The patent is

5,475,733  December 12, 1995
Language accommodated message relaying for hearing impaired callers

Inventors
Eisdorfer; Jerry (Somerset, NJ); Kasday; Leonard R. (Moorestown, NJ); 
Schulz; David E. (Wheaton, IL)

It contains an algorithm for identifying the language of text in TTY 
transmissions.  This might be used e.g. to check if the LANG attribute 
should have been used in an HTML page, although that application is not 
mentioned in the patent (it was filed in 1994, before LANG was defined: cf 
http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/html/rfc1866.txt).

This patent was originally assigned to AT&T.  It may have been transferred 
to Lucent.




--
Leonard R. Kasday, Ph.D.
Institute on Disabilities/UAP and Dept. of Electrical Engineering at Temple 
University
(215) 204-2247 (voice)                 (800) 750-7428 (TTY)
http://astro.temple.edu/~kasday         mailto:kasday@acm.org

Chair, W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Evaluation and Repair Tools Group
http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/IG/

The WAVE web page accessibility evaluation assistant: 
http://www.temple.edu/inst_disabilities/piat/wave/