Computational cultural understanding (CCU)

The Computational Cultural Understanding (CCU) Program will create cross-cultural language understanding technologies to improve a DoD operator’s situational awareness and interactional effectiveness. CCU will build natural language processing technologies that recognize, adapt to, and recommend how to operate within the emotional, social, and cultural norms that differ across societies, languages, and group affinities. To support diverse and emergent use cases, CCU technologies will be engineered to require minimal-to-no training data in a local culture, while maximizing operator success during negotiations and other interactions in the field. Automated systems would be a welcome force-multiplier for DoD interpreters; however, unlike the human cultural interpreters who enable US forces today, such systems are currently incapable of accurately analyzing cross-cultural communication or providing useful assistance to negotiations beyond basic machine translation. To achieve relative parity with human interpreters, CCU research will provide foundational technical innovations to assist negotiators and analysts with language analysis and cross-cultural dialogue in the field. These advances in the area of cross-cultural understanding will also inform processes for training and planning.