Good Old Ars wrote:The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) isn't known for thinking small, and DARPA has turned its attention (and budget) to a massive task: developing a set of software engines that can transcribe, translate, and summarize both text and speech without training or human intervention. The program, called the Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE), attempts to address the lack of qualified linguists and analysts who know important languages like Mandarin and Arabic.
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For some reason I'm skepitical that it will be able to pull out the nuance for intelligence work.
It's not that difficult to recruit or train people to become proficient in a language. This strikes me as trying to develop a sledgehammer to smash a grasshopper.
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kheegan wrote:It's not that difficult to recruit or train people to become proficient in a language. This strikes me as trying to develop a sledgehammer to smash a grasshopper.
Yes, but then they'd have to recruit a lot of non-white people, and everyone knows that non-white people are terrorists.
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kheegan wrote:It's not that difficult to recruit or train people to become proficient in a language. This strikes me as trying to develop a sledgehammer to smash a grasshopper.
Yes, but then they'd have to recruit a lot of non-white people, and everyone knows that non-white people are terrorists.
Not to mention queers and other undesirable liberals.
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Darth Wong wrote:
Yes, but then they'd have to recruit a lot of non-white people, and everyone knows that non-white people are terrorists.
Actually, it's because doing a background check on someone who has relatives in, say, Damascus is a pain in the ass. It's easier to have teach whities(Publius not withstanding) Arabic or whatever if you need to gaurentee a TS/SCI clearence. For stuff like "translate for Specialist Timmy in Iraq" you can just say "suck it" and hire contractors. The Corporation I work for has a multi-billion dollar contract to that effect, although even then they agressively recruit in India instead of Arabic or other mostly Muslim countries.
"The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles."
Original article wrote:
When bid solicitations went out last year, they told interested parties that DARPA wanted three separate modules built. The first handles the transcription of spoken languages into text. The second is a translation module that can convert foreign text into English, and the third is a "distillation" engine that can answer questions and summarize information provided by the other two modules.
[...]
Most of this information simply goes untranslated, but if GALE is a success, the US government would have access to transcriptions of foreign broadcast news, talk shows, newspaper articles, blogs, e-mails, and telephone conversations. Even with the translation work done, though, this information would be overwhelming, which is why the distillation engine is such an important component of the product.
It looks like much of the goal is to be able to scan through many millions of person-hours of everything from emails to telephone conversations. For example, perhaps the system would search for words and phrases related to a topic of concern, then bring a tiny fraction of the total intercepted to the attention of human analysts.
Certainly there are nuances in a language that no present-day computer translation program is going to capture. The DoD and the CIA seem to suffer from too little human intelligence on the ground, with too few spies in countries of concern. Intercepting emails doesn't do much good if some Sheikh passes messages riding around on a camel. However, when there is an information overload from electronic eavesdropping, some computer scanning may be the only way to have it all scanned, however imperfectly.
But seriously, it's Arabic, not Klingon. How hard is it for the government to buckle down and fork over money and have it taught to a thousand of our guys?
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They actually do. A friend of mine is in just such a program in the army. In fact, he will be finishing his training pretty soon (He spent two years learning the language).
I had a Bill Maher quote here. But fuck him for his white privelegy "joke".
I think a bigger issue then funding for such an endeavor is adequately teaching the language to enough people for it to be worth it. Maybe this is just my personal experience talking, but learning a new language seems to be very difficult for the vast majority of the population. This way, we don't have to worry about missing information due to either lack of personnel or lack of training.
LordShaithis wrote:Universal Translator for the win.
But seriously, it's Arabic, not Klingon. How hard is it for the government to buckle down and fork over money and have it taught to a thousand of our guys?
They do, man. There is a promient member of this board that is a grad of that program.
"The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles."
LordShaithis wrote:Universal Translator for the win.
But seriously, it's Arabic, not Klingon. How hard is it for the government to buckle down and fork over money and have it taught to a thousand of our guys?
It's arabic not French.
From the Clancy:
Special Forces pg 64
"... of these are quite easy (like Spanish), while others might require more than a year of study (like Chinese or Arabic). ..."
Arabic is not an Indo-European language, which doubles the amount of time to teach the same level of proficency as it would take for a lange is the same family as English, such as German or Russian. Also the number of skilled Arabic language translators has been a problem.
