Human Assessments of Translation

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has a requirement for human assessment of machine translation.

THIS IS A COMBINED SYNOPSIS/SOLICITATION FOR COMMERCIAL
ITEMS PREPARED IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE FORMAT IN FAR SUBPART 12.6-STREAMLINED PROCEDURES FOR EVALUATION AND SOLICITATION
FOR COMMERCIAL ITEMS-AS SUPPLEMENTED WITH ADDITIONAL INFORMATION INCLUDED IN THIS NOTICE. THIS ANNOUNCEMENT CONSTITUTES THE ONLY SOLICITATION; QUOTATIONS ARE BEING REQUESTED, AND A SEPARATE WRITTEN SOLICITATION DOCUMENT WILL NOT BE ISSUED. THE SOLICITATION IS BEING ISSUED USING SIMPLIFIED ACQUISITION PROCEDURES UNDER THE AUTHORITY OF FAR PART 13.

This solicitation is a Request for Quotation (RFQ). The solicitation document and incorporated provisions and clauses are those in effect through Federal Acquisition Circular (FAC) 2005-76

1352.215-72 INQUIRIES (APR 2010)

Offerors must submit all questions concerning this solicitation in writing to divya.soni@nist.gov. Questions should be received no later August 29, 2014. Any responses to questions will be made in writing, without identification of the questioner, and will be included in an amendment to the solicitation. Even if provided in other form, only the question responses included in the amendment to the solicitation will govern performance of the contract.
(End of Provision)

The associated North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS) code for this procurement is 541930 with a small business size standard of $7.5 million.

This acquisition is 100% set-aside for small business.

Background:
The IAD Multimodal Information Group supports Human Language Technology (HLT) research and development objectives through collaborations with other agencies to advance HLT systems in support of speech analysis, video analysis, machine translation and speaker and language recognition technologies.

Machine Translation is a technology that automates the translation of a data (text, image or audio), either written or spoken, in one language to that of another. This translation technology is emerging as an effective communication tool for industry, academia, and our military, and this technology is enabling greater information access, a goal of the NIST Information Access Division. NIST supports the government-wide effort to increase machine translation capabilities through research and evaluation designed to address factors negatively effecting translation performance. NIST designs experimental test protocols, provides guidance to help ensure that test data is collected as appropriate for addressing identified challenges, develops metrics and implements community evaluation that focus research on specific problems preventing the technology from reaching its full potential.

This procurement requires the performance of tasks and deliverables the Multimodal Information Group requires to fulfill their mission of advancing the measurement science for machine translation evaluation of text input. More specifically this procurement will generate the human assessments of machine translation output for informal genres that can be scientifically compared to automated metrics in accordance with the attached Statement of Work (SOW).

See attached solicitation and SOW.