DARPA Awards BBN Technologies $16 Million in Defense Funding

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - BBN Technologies was 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.

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 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 processing at all system levels to optimize performance by adapting to different languages, dialects, topics, speakers, semantic nuance, and more.