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ISCApad Archive » 2016 » ISCApad #220 » Academic and Industry Notes » New funding opportunity at iARPA |
ISCApad #220 |
Tuesday, October 11, 2016 by Chris Wellekens |
Dear Speech Scientist:
IARPA would like to announce a new funding opportunity involving speech recognition, information retrieval, summarization, domain adaptation and machine translation of low resource languages -- the forthcoming MATERIAL Program.
A Proposers' Day for MATERIAL will occur in the DC area on Sept. 27, 2016. A formal solicitation for proposals is expected to follow the Proposers' Day. Please note that registration for this event closes on Sept. 20. To register for this event, please visit: BRIEF PROGRAM DESCRIPTION AND GOALS
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 text and speech 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.
For updated information on the program, please visit: |
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