The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity has awarded separate contracts to Raytheon‘s BBN Technologies business, Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute to develop language processing software platforms.
All five awardees will aim to produce systems designed to identify and comprehend media documents written in foreign languages under the Machine Translation for English Retrieval of Information in Any Language initiative, IARPA said Dec. 22.
The program also seeks cross-language summarization tools that can streamline needed data processes.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory, the University of Maryland Center for Advanced Study of Language, National Institute of Standards and Technology and Tarragon Consulting will administer the evaluation procedures under the MATERIAL effort.