IARPA seeks proposals for BETTER program

On July 6, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity released the final broad agency announcement for the Better Extraction from Text Towards Enhanced Retrieval (BETTER) program (Solicitation Number: IARPA-BAA-18-05). Proposals are due by 5:00 p.m. Eastern on September 14.

This BAA (IARPA-BAA-18-05) is for the BETTER program. IARPA is seeking innovative solutions for the BETTER program in this BAA. The goal of the BETTER program is to develop new methods for multi-lingual semantic information extraction with applications to information retrieval. The BETTER program is envisioned to begin January 2019 and end by July 2022.

The Better Extraction from Text Towards Enhanced Retrieval (BETTER) Program will develop methods for extracting increasingly fine-grained semantic information, with a focus of events in the form of who-did-what-to-whom-when-where, across multiple languages and problem domains. This extracted information will be applied to an information retrieval task. An additional area of focus is human-in-the-loop computation. Performer systems will need the ability to incorporate human judgments for metrics such as relevancy and accuracy of extracted or retrieved information. These requirements translate into three major research thrusts:

• Information extraction (IE) – Offerors will propose novel approaches for extracting semantic information, such as political events, from a foreign-language corpus using English-language training data.

• Information retrieval (IR) – Offerors will propose methods for incorporating semantic information, such as the previously mentioned political events, into an information retrieval setting.

• Human computation – Offerors will propose methods that allow for human-in-the-loop updates to developed algorithms in order to improve accuracy and relevancy of the extracted and retrieved information created during the program phases.

Full information is available here.

Source: FedBizOpps