BBN Technologies Awarded $16 Million in Defense Funding to Advance Rapid Foreign Language Processing.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- BBN Technologies, an advanced technology solutions firm, announced today it has been awarded $16 million in additional funding by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in year two of the Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) program.

The goal of GALE is to develop and apply software technologies to transcribe speech, translate both speech and text, and distill large volumes of speech and text in multiple languages, with over 90% accuracy by the end of the program. Such a capability would help U.S. analysts recognize critical information in foreign languages quickly so they could act on it in a timely fashion. During the first year of the program, BBN achieved or exceeded the goals of 75% accuracy for translation of text and 65% for speech, whether it was the well-articulated speech of broadcast news or the more informal speech of broadcast conversations. In year two, the accuracy goals become more challenging.

Tad Elmer, president and CEO, BBN Technologies, said, "The BBN team performed very well on the evaluation at the end of year one. Achieving the performance that DARPA requires in the years ahead will demand the best work from the best minds in the field--fortunately, that's who we have on our team."

The BBN GALE team includes BBN speech and language scientists as well as researchers from academic institutions in the U.S. and abroad. The BBN team is taking an integrated approach to reaching the ambitious accuracy goals by integrating the transcription, translation, and distillation components into a single process instead of using the traditional linked approach of speech-to-text (STT) followed by machine translation (MT) and distillation. Because language, both speech and text, is fluid, the BBN team will use automatic adaptation and contextually-aware processing at all system levels to optimize performance by adapting to different languages, dialects, topics, speakers, semantic nuance, and more.

About BBN Technologies

BBN Technologies, an advanced technology solutions firm, is focused on solving some of the world's most pressing problems. From national security, information security, speech recognition and language translation, to integrating disparate systems and networks, BBN has been at the forefront of technological change for over 50 years.

Known for pioneering the development of the ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet, BBN continues to create advances in Internet and networking technologies through its work on ad-hoc networking, the semantic web, quantum communications, and advanced protocols. Building on its substantial list of firsts, BBN operates the first metro quantum cryptography network, the first real-time foreign broadcast monitoring system, and has developed the world's first stereoscopic digital mammography system. For more information, visit bbn.com.