DARPA awards BBN $30 million in Machine Reading project
Machine reading technology would be used particularly by military intelligence staff seeking to boil down mountains of information about theaters or areas of operation into useful form
By Lewis Page
BBN is famous for inventing forerunner Internet kit, and for giving the world the “@” symbol in e-mail addresses. The company has now received $29.7 million from DARPA to automate Internet functions. The Pentagon’s Machine Reading program is explained this way by DARPA:
The U.S. military frequently faces impediments to stability and reconstruction operations in a new location due to the lack of understanding of the local situation. Similarly, strategic assessment of a foreign nation’s science and technology base involves the continuous assessment of technical articles, bibliographies, conference agendas, etc. This information is often available on the World Wide Web, and some tools to assist this analysis are available, but the process would be significantly enhanced by a system that could directly analyze the information found in these text sources. The same reasoning could be equally valuable if applied to other types of open-source intelligence analysis, including assessing military readiness and posturing; political speeches, actions, and more obscure “messages”; economic trends and sentiments; and propaganda from terrorist groups and even their hidden web-based communications.
BBN has now contracted BBN to develop processing software able to turn “natural language” information — for instance, text written by humans for humans — into “formal language” data usable by military AI systems. Lewis Page writes that machine reading technology would be used particularly by military intelligence staff seeking to boil down mountains of information about theaters or areas of operation into useful form.
DARPA plan to assess several candidate systems — BBN’s among them — by a complex process apparently involving the implantation of a funnel into somebody’s head (see graphic). “The machine reading system that DARPA envisions is not evolutionary, but revolutionary,” says Prem Natarajan, speech and language processing veep at BBN. “Such a system could eliminate many of the impediments to stability that our military faces such as a lack of understanding of local customs, and give us the ability to assess global technology developments continuously.”
Page notes that Machine Reading ware would also be of use to businesses and other organizations seeking to avoid the expense of having people in offices reading the Internet and reprocessing it.
