Machine Translation for English Retrieval of Information in Any Language (MATERIAL)
Current methods to produce similar technologies require a substantial investment in training data and/or language specific development and expertise, entailing many months or years of development. A goal of this program is to drastically decrease the time and data needed to field systems capable of fulfilling an English-in, English out task. Limited machine translation and automatic speech recognition training data will be provided from multiple low resource languages to enable performers to learn how to quickly adapt their methods to a wide variety of materials in various genres and domains. As the program progresses, performers will apply and adapt these methods in increasingly shortened time frames to new languages. Program data will include formal and informal genres of text and speech which will not be fully captured by the training data. Image and video are out of scope for this program.
Performers will be evaluated, relative to a baseline system, on their ability to accurately retrieve materials relevant to an English domain-specific query from a database of multi-domain, multi-genre documents in a low resource language, and their ability to convey the relevance of those documents through summaries presented to English speaking domain experts.
To develop such an end-to-end system, large multi-disciplinary teams will be required with expertise in a number of relevant technical areas including, but not limited to, natural language processing, low resource languages, machine translation, corpora analysis, domain adaptation, computational linguistics, speech recognition, language identification, semantics, summarization, information retrieval, and machine learning. Since language-independent approaches with quick ramp up time are sought, foreign language expertise in the languages of the program is not expected. IARPA anticipates that universities and companies from around the world will participate in this research program. Researchers will be encouraged to publish their findings in publicly-available, academic journals.
Contracting Office Address
Office of the Director of National Intelligence
Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity
Washington, DC 20511
Primary Point of Contact
Carl Rubino
Program Manager
dni-iarpa-baa-16-11@iarpa.gov
Solicitation Status: CLOSED
IARPA-BAA-16-11
Proposers' Day Date: September 27, 2016
BAA Release Date: January 19, 2017
BAA Question Period: January 19, 2017 - February 20, 2017
Proposal Due Date: March 20, 2017
Additional Information
IARPA-BAA-16-11 Q&A (round one)
IARPA-BAA-16-11 Q&A (round two)
Proposers' Day Briefings
MATERIAL Proposers' Day Briefing
- Digital Operatives (presentation)
- LexisNexis (presentation)
- Li Creative Technologies (presentation)
- M Modal (presentation)
- National Research Council of Canada (presentation)
- Purdue University (presentation)
- SpeechTrans (poster)
- SpeechTrans (presentation)
- SYSTRAN (presentation)
- Toyota Technology Institute at Chicago (poster)