Proposers' Day Announcement for the IARPA Babel Program

Event Notification Type: 
Call for Participation
Location: 
IARPA, MS2
Thursday, 20 January 2011
State: 
MD
Country: 
USA
City: 
College Park
Submission Deadline: 
Thursday, 13 January 2011

SYNOPSIS
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) will host a Proposers' Day Conference for the Babel Program on January 20, 2011, in anticipation of the release of a new solicitation in support of the program. The Conference will be held from 8:30 AM to 4:00 PM in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. The purpose of the conference will be to provide information on Babel, to address questions from potential proposers, and to provide a forum for potential proposers to present their capabilities and find potential team partners. This announcement serves as a pre-solicitation notice and is issued solely for information and planning purposes. The Proposers' Day Conference does not constitute a formal solicitation for proposals or proposal abstracts. Conference attendance is voluntary and is not required to propose to future solicitations (if any) associated with this program.

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION AND GOALS
The goal of the Babel Program is to develop methods to build speech recognition technology for a much larger set of languages than has hitherto been addressed. The Program will require innovations in how to rapidly model a novel language with significantly less training data that are also much noisier and more heterogeneous than what has been used in the current state-of-the-art. Babel's technical measures of success are focused on how well the generated model works to support effective word-based search of noisy channel speech in the languages to be investigated. The new methods will be systematized so that they can be applied rapidly to a novel underserved language.

The Babel Program seeks technical innovations in the following areas: (a) multilingual speech processing with robustness to noisy recordings; (b) machine learning methods that optimize their use of limited training data; (c) linguistics to ensure portability across languages; and (d) word search to support the application of the speech models.

Collaborative efforts/teaming among potential performers is strongly encouraged. It is anticipated that teams will be multidisciplinary with expertise in linguistics, computational linguistics, machine learning, speech science, and signal processing. IARPA anticipates that universities and companies from around the world will participate in this research. Researchers will be able to publish their findings in publicly-available, academic journals.