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November 10, 2005BELTWAY BLOGROLL
Defense Agency Wants To Translate Blogs
The Defense Department research wing that created the Internet now has its sights set on computer technologies that could translate foreign-language Web sites, including blogs.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on Monday awarded IBM a contract worth nearly $8.3 million to work on a program known as Global Autonomous Language Exploitation, or GALE.
The research, which eventually will cost more than $12.8 million, aims to eliminate the need for human analysts and linguists, according to a description at FedGrants.gov. Instead, military personnel and English-speaking analysts will be able to have foreign-language information delivered to them automatically in translated form.
The grant description said the winning contractors will be tasked with creating computer engines that can "process naturally-occurring speech and text of all the following types: broadcast news, talk shows, newswire, newsgroups, Web logs and telephone conversations. The source languages will be English, Chinese and Arabic, plus surprise languages to be announced later." The department release announcing the contract said the work will be performed in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., and will be completed in October 2010.
"GALE is a research program to develop technologies so that computers can translate text in a foreign language into English and summarize and organize it into categories such that it is a useful to humans," DARPA spokesman Jan Walker said via e-mail. "For the research, they need large volumes of electronic files of foreign-language text, and the Web is a good source."
When asked whether the research will extract text for translation from particular blogs or types of blogs, including those in the United States, Walker declined to elaborate. "The focus is the development of technology for machine translation," he said. "This is not an effort to troll blogs, sorry."
Recent DARPA research projects, including its plan for Total Information Awareness to be achieved by mining databases for information on potential terrorists, have sparked firestorms of protest from privacy advocates and others.
An IBM spokesman also said the company could not "answer specifically what DARPA's plans are," in part because the research is just beginning. He added that the company has "a long history" of creating machine-based translation services.
IBM also is involved in the blog-monitoring business. On the same day that DARPA announced the award to IBM, the company introduced software to help businesses monitor comments about them on blogs, news feeds, newsgroups and other social networks.
"Companies are seeking new ways to better understand how they are viewed by customers, investors and other stakeholders who have an impact on their brand reputation," Jon Prial, the vice president of content management and discovery, said in a release. "This solution can help clients track and analyze the pulse of the public in real-time, allowing organizations to be more responsive and deliver better service to their customers."
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