Anna Forrester
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has awarded Phase 1 contracts to 13 organizations from industry and academia to help develop automated translation technology for DARPA’s Low Resource Languages for Emergent Incidents program.
DARPA said Thursday LORELEI aims to utilize public information sources in local languages to support quick-response operations such as disaster relief, humanitarian assistance, peacekeeping and infectious disease response in local communities.
“The goal is to provide immediate, evolving situational awareness that helps decision-makers assess and respond as intelligently as possible to dynamic, difficult situations,” said Boyan Onyshkevych, program manager at DARPA.
Awardees for the program’s first phase are:
- Appen
- Carnegie Mellon University
- Columbia University
- Johns Hopkins University
- Next Century Corp.
- Raytheon BBN
- University of Illinois Urbana – Champaign
- University of Massachusetts
- University of Pennsylvania
- University of Pennsylvania Linguistic Data Consortium
- University of Texas – El Paso
- University of Washington
- University Southern California Information Sciences Institute
LORELEI aims to support the development of computational linguistics and human language technology to provide rapid, automated language capabilities.
The program will focus on the areas of algorithm research and development environment, runtime framework development and linguistic resource creation.
DARPA has scheduled an Industry Day for Nov. 13 to provide additional information for participants.
