Army, Raytheon BBN to track metaphors under IARPA research program
NewsMay 14, 2012
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. Officials at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or IARPA, through the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL), selected Raytheon BBN Technologies to create analysis tools and techniques that enable insights into the underlying beliefs and worldviews revealed by metaphors.
Raytheon BBN was awarded $2.5 million in funding for the work under the METAPHOR program. The system will automatically find, identify, and categorize linguistic metaphors in expansive amounts of foreign language text.
"Awareness and understanding of metaphors will provide novel insight into underlying cultural beliefs," says Prem Natarajan, Raytheon BBN Technologies head of speech and language processing.
Under the contract, Raytheon BBN engineers will design techniques and tools to identify, qualify, and categorize metaphors; build a metaphor repository for identifying and linking key elements of linguistic metaphors to the conceptual metaphor; and create a metaphorical language analysis system.
