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The IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY won a $9.7 million cost-reimbursement contract modification to support the intelligence analyst research effort called Rosetta: An Analyst Co-Pilot.

Rosetta will tightly couple speech transcription, language transition, and adaptive, multi-source information distillation in ways that permit English-speaking intelligence analysts to focus on and understand the most important information in their area of expertise.

Rosetta is IBM’s name for the work it is doing under the US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s (DARPA) Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) Program, according to DARPA’s Jan Walker…

The goal of the GALE program is to develop and apply computer software technologies to absorb, translate, analyze, and interpret huge volumes of speech and text in multiple languages, eliminating the need for linguists and analysts, and providing relevant, concise, actionable information to military command and personnel in a timely fashion. Automatic processing “engines” will convert and distill the data, delivering pertinent, consolidated information in an understandable form to military personnel and monolingual English-speaking analysts in response to direct or implicit requests.

This contract modification initiates Phase 4 of the program and set up an option for Phase 5. IBM expects to complete the work under this contract modification by June 30/11. Bids were solicited for the original contract (HR0011-08-C-0110) using a Broad Agency Announcement with 21 bids received by the DARPA Contract Management Office in Arlington, VA.

Additional Reading

• DARPA – Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE)

• DARPA (2008) – TRanslation technology: Breaking the Language Barrier

• DARPA (2005) – GALE Solicitation Information Pamphlet

• DID (Nov 14/05) – Firms Continue GALE Work on Automated Translation (updated)