SRI International has been awarded the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) contract under DARPA's BOLT program. BOLT is an international research initiative to develop breakthrough language technologi

"Machine translation technology has made major progress over the past decade," said Jing Zheng, Ph.D., leader of SRI's BOLT initiative and program director in SRI's Speech Technology and Research (STAR) Laboratory.

"Now we will work on fundamental breakthroughs to move from memorizing the surface forms of language to understanding the underlying meanings," Zheng continued.

SRI will lead research activities with the goal of developing systems that accurately translate foreign languages and extract information regardless of genre and media. These technologies are intended to facilitate bilingual conversations with instant interpretation and automatic clarification.

SRI has a strong record of delivering breakthrough technologies in artificial intelligence and complex language-processing systems for DARPA.

Decades of SRI research in artificial intelligence, including leadership of the largest known artificial intelligence project in U.S. history (CALO), led to the development of the groundbreaking virtual personal assistant technology called Siri. Siri was acquired from SRI by Apple in 2010.

SRI's speech and translation work includes research under DARPA's Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) program to develop computer software that translates and analyzes huge volumes of speech and text in multiple languages, and under the Spoken Language Communication and Translation System for Tactical Use (TRANSTAC) program to enable two-way communication between U.S. warfighters and speakers of other languages.

To achieve the objectives of the BOLT program, SRI researchers will build upon many of the linguistic resources and technologies developed for the GALE and TRANSTAC programs.

See Also

• More about translation
  An accurate professional translation can save a patient's life, win a bid, or persuade a shopper to buy your product.
• The complete PR Newswire press release
  SRI International has been awarded a $7.1 million contract for Phase 1 of a five-year, $41.5 million Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) contract.
• More about SRI International
  SRI International is an independent, nonprofit research institute conducting client-sponsored research and development for government agencies, commercial businesses, foundations, and other organizations. SRI also brings its innovations to the marketplace by licensing its intellectual property and creating new ventures.
• More about DARPA
  The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technology for use by the military. From Wikipedia.