On
March 28, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency released a call for
proposals for the Grounded Artificial Intelligence Language Acquisition (GAILA) program. Proposals are due by
12:00 p.m. Eastern on April 26.
The Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA) is issuing an Artificial Intelligence Exploration (AIE)
Opportunity, inviting submissions of innovative basic research concepts in the
technical domain of human language technology, cognitive science, and language
acquisition.
This AIE Opportunity is issued under the Program
Announcement for AIE, DARPA-PA-18-02. All proposals in response to the Grounded
Artificial Intelligence Language Acquisition (GAILA) opportunity, as described
herein, will be submitted to DARPA-PA-18-02-06.
The past few decades have seen explosive growth in
development and training of AI systems, which are now embodied in digital
computing processes spanning several key industries. One area that has
benefited from AI, and specifically Machine Learning (ML) techniques and
statistical methods, is the area of Human Language Technology (HLT). These
methods have provided significant improvements to numerous language
technologies such as machine translation, information retrieval, name entity
detection, event detection, knowledge base creation, and more. These
technologies have been successfully deployed in government, defense, and
commercial settings, such as for call centers, reservation services, and
personal assistants such as Siri and Alexa.
However, ML suffers from a need of large amounts of
annotated data for training in order to achieve the required accuracy for the
various applications. ML technology is also brittle, incapable of dealing with
new data sources, topics, media, and vocabularies. These weaknesses of ML as
applied to natural language are due to exclusive reliance on the statistical
aspects of language, with no regard for its meaning.
The primary goal of this effort is to research and develop a model for grounded language acquisition and an automated language acquisition prototype that learns to understand English text and speech, for the purpose of making the information more useable by automated analytics.
Full information is available here.
Source: FedBizOpps
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