Broad Operational Language Translation (BOLT)
Abstract
The Broad Operational Language Translation (BOLT) program is enabling communication in informal and dialectal genres. Historically, foreign language translation technology was geared toward formal content, like broadcast media and newswire, but did not address informal or dialectal genres. BOLT is developing new approaches to automated language translation, human-machine multimodal dialogue, and language generation and applying these to informal genre such as online discussion groups, messaging, and telephone conversation. BOLT will leverage the strengths of statistical and rule-based approaches to form hybrid machine translation techniques that are more robust to linguistic dialectal variation; develop new techniques for modeling word relationships, functions, and context; and utilize syntactic and semantic patterns to fill in the linguistic gaps inherent in conversational language and to accelerate statistical learning. While Chinese and dialectal Arabic are the two languages addressed directly in BOLT, techniques developed for these two languages will have wide applicability to other languages and dialects. BOLT will enable warfighters and military/government personnel to readily communicate with coalition partners and local populations and will enhance intelligence through better exploitation of all language sources.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Accomplishment
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2015
- Source ID
- 331572d3ed61d6254b9a01b559180ac0