Broad Operational Language Translation (BOLT)

DARPA issued BAA-11-40 to solicit ideas for its new Human Language Technology (HLT) research and development program called Broad Operational Language Translation (BOLT), specifically with the intended purpose to solicit proposed research that investigates innovative approaches that will enable revolutionary advances in science, devices, or systems; not merely research that primarily results in evolutionary improvements to the existing state of practice. The purpose of BOLT is to specifically create technology capable of the following:

1. Translate multiple foreign languages in all genres, retrieving information from the translated material, and enabling bilingual communication via speech or text;

2. Accurate translation into English of all language genres, including informal speech and text such as occurs in e-mail, messaging and conversational speech in Arabic (including a variety of dialects such as Levantine or Iraqi) and Mandarin Chinese;

3. Capability for human-machine communication by voice in English and Arabic using multi-modal input for robotic control or desk-top applications and multi-turn, bilingual human-human conversation in speech or text including a monolingual human-machine dialogue in both languages for clarification and disambiguation;

4. Capability to retrieve targeted information from multi-lingual sources using natural language English queries with human-machine clarification and disambiguation dialogue and means to annotate documents (textual or spoken) for fast comprehensive search;

5. Research in deep semantic language acquisition using robotic visual and tactile information as input for experiential learning of objects, actions, and consequences; and

6. Research in basic technologies such as parsing, Semantic Role Labeling (SRL), language modeling, etc. that is essential to the success of the above.