[Upd-discuss] BBN Gets $30M DARPA Award to Teach Machines to Read

[Seth Johnson]

(So will this be publicly-available technology? -- Seth)


> http://bbn.com/news_and_events/press_releases/2009_press_releases/pr_machine_tran


BBN Technologies Awarded $30 Million in Defense Funding to Teach
Machines to Read


Cambridge, Mass., June 22, 2009 — BBN Technologies, an advanced
technology solutions firm, has been awarded $29.7 million in funding
by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under the
Machine Reading program in a contract awarded by the Air Force
Research Laboratory (AFRL). The goal of the Machine Reading program is
to develop a revolutionary, automated reading system that bridges the
gap between naturally occurring text and the artificial intelligence
reasoning systems that need such knowledge.

Although this intelligent learning system would initially be used to
automate military intelligence analysis, it could also enable a
variety of civilian applications. For example, as more and more of the
world’s libraries are converted to digital text, this system could
provide unprecedented access and automated analysis, allowing for
vastly expanded cultural awareness and historical and cultural
research.

Under this contract, BBN will leverage its expertise in natural
language processing and distillation to develop a universal text
engine that captures knowledge from text and transforms it into the
formal representations required by artificial intelligence systems. A
central goal of the research effort is to develop techniques that can
generalize across the linguistic structure and content of diverse
documents to extract relations and axioms directly from text rather
than relying on a knowledge engineer to encode such information. A
related goal is to develop techniques capable of performing such
automatic extraction of text at the massive scale available on the
World Wide Web. Over the course of the five-year program, BBN’s system
will be tested against increasingly complex targets, including its
ability to learn axioms from text and to read and digest vast
quantities of Web text.

Prem Natarajan, vice president, Speech and Language Processing, BBN
Technologies, said, "The machine reading system that DARPA envisions
is not evolutionary, but revolutionary. Such a system could eliminate
many of the impediments to stability that our military faces such as a
lack of understanding of local customs, and give us the ability to
assess global technology developments continuously."

About BBN Technologies

BBN Technologies is a legendary R&D organization that leverages its
substantial intellectual property portfolio to produce advanced,
repeatable solutions such as the Boomerang shooter detection system.
With expertise spanning information security, speech and language
processing, networking, distributed systems, and sensing and control
systems, BBN scientists and engineers have amassed a substantial
collection of innovations and patented solutions. BBN now employs over
780 people in seven locations in the US: Cambridge, Massachusetts
(headquarters); Arlington, Virginia; Columbia, Maryland; Middletown,
Rhode Island; San Diego, California; St. Louis Park, Minnesota; and
O'Fallon, Illinois. For more information,visit www.bbn.com.