DARPA seeks strong, responsive proposals from well-qualified sources for a new research and development program called GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) with the goal of eliminating the need for linguists and analysts and automatically providing relevant, distilled actionable information to military command and personnel in a timely fashion.
Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) is an unbelievably ambitious DARPA project from the same office that brought us the ARPANET (Information Processing Technology Office.) Imagine if they succeed? Thanks to Greg Crane for pointing this out.
Update – the DARPA Information Processing Technology Office page on GALE is here. Under the GALE Proposer Pamphlet (BAA 05-28) there is a description of the types of discourse that should be processed and the desired results.
Engines must be able to process naturally-occurring speech and text of all the following types:
- Broadcast news (radio, television)
- Talk shows (studio, call-in)
- Newswire
- Newsgroups
- Weblogs
- Telephone conversations
. . .
DARPA’s desired end result includes
- A transcription engine that produces English transcripts with 95% accuracy
- A translation engine producing English text with 95% accuracy
- A distillation engine able to fill knowledge bases with key facts and to deliver useful information as proficiently as humans can.