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IARPA MATERIAL Program

The IARPA MATERIAL program ran from 2018-2021. I participated as part of the Raytheon BBN Technoligies (FLAIR) team. The program could be seen as a spiritual successor to the IARPA BABEL Program.

The primary goal of the program was to help analysts triage large volumes of audio and text in languages they did not understand. An analyst would interact with the system by searching for keywords and phrases in English. The system would then return potential relevant documents, translate them, and present a summary for the analyst. While such a system might have been feasible in Spanish or German at the start of the program, MATERIAL focuses on languages with limited training data. The limited training data was also typically out-of-domain as well.

A successful system required advances in automatic speech recognition, machine translation, information retrieval, and summarization.

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