Intel Geek Squad Targets Culture, Language
By Sharon Weinberger
2 Jan 2008
The newly created Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency -- one of the latest attempts to create a new DARPA-like entity -- has released a preliminary solicitation that gives a good indication of what one of the agency's primary interests will be -- culture (and linguistics). IARPA this month began soliciting proposals for the "Socio-cultural Content in Language Program":
IARPA’s SCIL Program is seeking innovative, creative, cutting-edge research to achieve advancements in technologies that significantly expand human language understanding. As a mirror of socio-cultural norms and principles, language reflects people’s beliefs, goals, intentions and relationships. This R&D program intends to explore automated methods of correlating socio-cultural features with human language indicators. The goal of the program is to develop new approaches to expanding our knowledge of context, meaning and identity.
It looks like IARPA may be targeting a slightly different niche than other agencies and offices working on socio-cultural issues, saying it does not want to continue "the standard work done in Information or Content Extraction, Social Network Analysis nor Data Mining." IARPA, at least for this proposal, wants to correlate linguistics with socio-cultural characteristics.
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