IARPA awards translator tech contracts

The intelligence community's research arm is a step closer to developing a universal "English in-English out" text translator that will eventually allow English speakers to search through multilingual data oceans such as social media, newswires and press reports and retrieve pertinent data in English.

Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity awarded research and performance monitoring contracts for its Machine Translation for English Retrieval of Information in Any Language program to teams headed by leading research universities paired with federal technology contractors.

IARPA, the research arm of the Office of Director of National Intelligence, hopes the multiyear MATERIAL program will eventually yield a cross-language search platform and automatic systems that will allow English-only speakers to identify and retrieve foreign language documents.

On Dec. 22, IARPA announced the award of research contracts to teams led by Johns Hopkins University, Raytheon BBN Technologies, Columbia University and University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute.

A team consisting of MIT Lincoln Laboratory, University of Maryland Center for Advanced Study of Language, National Institute of Standards and Technology and Tarragon Consulting will monitor the research teams' development work, assessing performance of a variety of complex end-to-end solutions.

Intelligence agencies, said IARPA project managers in a statement in late December, grapple with an increasingly multilingual, worldwide data pool to do their analytic work. Most of those languages, they said, have few or no automated tools for cross-language data mining.