Raytheon BBN Technologies Awarded $17 Million in Defense Funding to Advance Rapid Foreign Language Processing

Raytheon BBN Technologies Awarded $17 Million in Defense Funding to Advance Rapid Foreign Language Processing
June 21, 2010

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., - Raytheon Company's (NYSE: RTN) BBN Technologies has been awarded an additional $17 million in funding by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the final year of the five-year Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) program.

The goal of GALE is to develop and apply software technologies to transcribe, translate, and distill large volumes of speech and text in multiple languages – all with more than 90 percent accuracy by the end of the program. This capability will help U.S. analysts quickly recognize critical information in foreign languages.

During the first four years of the GALE program, BBN met or exceeded almost all the accuracy goals for automatic translation of Arabic news-related text and broadcast news into English. Under this latest contract award, BBN will continue to improve translation of speech and text from Arabic and Chinese news sources.

Tad Elmer, president, Raytheon BBN Technologies, said: "DARPA's GALE program is already responsible for many great advances in machine translation, and BBN has deployed systems for monitoring live broadcasts in foreign languages in more than two dozen locations. This new funding will allow us to achieve an even higher level of machine translation accuracy."

The Raytheon BBN Technologies GALE team includes BBN speech and language scientists as well as researchers from a dozen institutions in the U.S. and abroad. Under the contract, Raytheon BBN Technologies will further refine a translation system developed under previous awards in this program.

The Raytheon BBN Technologies team's approach combines the output transcriptions and translations from multiple systems to obtain a translation that is better than any of the component system translations. The team is using automatic adaptation and contextually aware processing at all system levels to optimize performance across different languages, dialects, topics, speakers, and semantic nuance to deliver the relevant information.

Raytheon BBN Technologies is a wholly owned subsidiary of Raytheon Company.

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