The IC’s top research arm, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), wants to be able to get the gist anywhere and anytime. They are inviting researchers from around the world in industry and academia to use machine learning to develop algorithms for cross-lingual information retrieval capable of extracting answers from little-known foreign languages to questions posed in English. IARPA’s Open Cross-language Information Retrieval (CLIR) Challenge is inviting participants to compete for prizes while working on a kind of fast-working translator that can interpret other languages while using a minimal amount of training data, focusing particularly on what it calls “computationally underserved languages.” […]

The Intelligence Community wants to develop a kind of universal translator that will search documents across a full range of media and make sense of them for English-speaking analysts. […]