Intel gathering

IARPA contracts for universal text translator

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity is a step closer to developing a universal text translator that will eventually allow English speakers to search through multilanguage data sources -- such as social media, newswires and press reports -- and retrieve results in English.

The intelligence community's research arm awarded research and performance monitoring contracts for its Machine Translation for English Retrieval of Information in Any Language program to teams headed by leading research universities paired with federal technology contractors.

IARPA hopes the multiyear MATERIAL program will eventually yield a cross-language search platform and automatic systems that will allow English-only speakers to identify and retrieve foreign language documents.

On Dec. 22, IARPA announced the award of research contracts to teams led by Johns Hopkins University, Raytheon BBN Technologies, Columbia University and University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute.