The Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) program aims to develop computer software technologies that can absorb, analyze and interpret huge volumes of speech and text in multiple languages. The idea is that automatic processing “engines” will convert and distill the data, delivering pertinent, consolidated information in easy-to-understand forms to military personnel and monolingual English-speaking analysts in response to direct or implicit requests. GALE will consist of three major engines: Transcription, Translation and Distillation.

As an aside, we suspect that many decision-makers would be even more pleased to have a system that displayed this capability with computer, business, and military jargon/acronyms.

Contracts under this Defense Advanced Research Project Agency program include…

November, 2005

IBM of Yorktown Heights, NY received an $8.3 million increment of a $12.9 million cost-reimbursement cooperative agreement. Work will be performed in Yorktown Heights, NY and will be completed in October 2010. Funds will expire at the end of this fiscal year (HR0011-06-2-0001).

BBNT Solutions LLC in Cambridge, MA received its own $9.5 million cost-plus-fixed-fee contract for GALE research. Work will be performed in Cambridge, MA and is expected to be complete by Oct. 31, 2010. Bids were solicited via the World Wide Web on March 18, 2005, and 21 bids were received. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year (HR0011-06-C-0022).

DARPA issued a solicitation in Federal Business Opportunities on March 18, 2005, and 21 proposals were received. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency issued the contract.