I am a researcher doing who has completed work in the area of word
sense
disambiguation. It is nothing but resolving the right sense of a
polysemous
word based on context. It is essential for applications such as
machine
translation and very useful for speech recognition, search engines
etc.
Right now I am looking for granting licence of the disambiguation
system to translation companies, information retrieval companies etc.
Could you give me
a ballpark estimate of the licence fee (say for 2 years) . The system
has a
vocabulary of 50000 words and isa significant improvement (more than
double)
over the best existing system.

Hi, cheenu-ga:

It sounds like a very interesting and potentially valuable piece of
software.  It's hard to know how to price a "license" for the software
without knowing more about the specific application.

I'm surprised you didn't mention OCR processing as a potential
application.  It might make the discussion of licensing easier with
other potential clients if you established the commercial feasibility
of applications with one client.  I would be thinking along the lines
of an initial payment plus per installation royalty for the software
as licensing fees.  My reading of your question suggests you are
looking for a single number however.

regards, mathtalk-ga