BBN Technologies Awarded $14 Million in DoD Funding to Advance Rapid Foreign Language Processing
Cambridge, Mass., July 28, 2009 — BBN Technologies, an advanced technology solutions firm, has been awarded $14 million in funding by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the fourth year of the five-year Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) program. The goal of GALE is to develop and apply software technologies to transcribe, translate, and distill large volumes of speech and text in multiple languages – all with more than 90% accuracy by the end of the program. Such a capability would help U.S. analysts recognize critical information in foreign languages quickly.
During the first three years of the GALE program, BBN met or exceeded the accuracy goals for automatic translation of Arabic newswire text and broadcast news into English. Under this latest contract award, BBN will continue to work in Arabic from both speech and text sources to meet increasingly steep accuracy goals. BBN continues to work in Chinese under a separate award.
Tad Elmer, president and CEO, BBN Technologies, said, "DARPA’s ambitious GALE program has already made significant advances in automatic language processing. We are achieving a level of accuracy that, before this program, was regarded as impossible."
The BBN GALE team includes BBN speech and language scientists as well as researchers from other institutions in the U.S. and abroad. The BBN team’s approach combines the output transcriptions and translations from multiple systems to obtain a translation that is better than any of the component system translations. Because language – both speech and text – is fluid, the BBN team is using automatic adaptation and contextually-aware processing at all system levels to optimize performance across different languages, dialects, topics, speakers, and semantic nuance, to deliver the relevant information.
About BBN Technologies
BBN Technologies is a legendary R&D organization that leverages its substantial intellectual property portfolio to produce advanced, repeatable solutions such as the Boomerang shooter detection system. With expertise spanning information security, speech and language processing, networking, distributed systems, and sensing and control systems, BBN scientists and engineers have amassed a substantial collection of innovations and patented solutions. BBN now employs over 700 people in seven locations in the US: Cambridge, Massachusetts (headquarters); Arlington, Virginia; Columbia, Maryland; Middletown, Rhode Island; San Diego, California; St. Louis Park, Minnesota; and O'Fallon, Illinois. For more information,visit www.bbn.com.
