Top minds taxed by translation challenge

By Brian Bergstein

updated 4:20 p.m. ET Nov. 5, 2006

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - The past few years have shown that U.S. government intelligence goes only so far. One of the biggest challenges is recognizing vital information in foreign languages — and acting quickly on it.

That’s why the military would love software that can listen to TV broadcasts or phone conversations and read Web sites in Arabic and Chinese, translate them into English and summarize the key elements for humans.

But each of those steps has long bedeviled computer scientists. Perfecting them and combining them — well, that is “DARPA hard.” That means it’s difficult even by the extreme standards of the Pentagon’s next-generation technology arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Last year DARPA launched a project that aims to create that real-time translation software. It’s called GALE, for Global Autonomous Language Exploitation. And on top of GALE’s technical challenges, DARPA added some twists.

It hired three teams of researchers to chase the problem for up to five years. Each year, their progress would be evaluated, and the worst-performing team could be eliminated. Or the program could be shut down entirely.

DARPA often threatens to cut — “downselect” in its lingo — people from a project. But in the small world of speech-to-text and machine-translation researchers, being booted off the GALE island would be an unfamiliar blow.

That’s because DARPA’s three choices for GALE contestants were among the best of the best: IBM Corp., backed by a $6 billion annual research budget; SRI International, a $300 million, nonprofit research organization based in Silicon Valley; and BBN Technologies Inc., a $200 million research contractor headquartered in Cambridge.

GALE might have threatened the most havoc at BBN — which let The Associated Press observe its progress for a rare peek into the frequently secretive work done for DARPA.

BBN executives and other investors purchased the company from its former owner, Verizon Communications Inc., in 2004, and are fighting to grow it in hopes of remaining independent. While BBN wants to diversify — it gets about 80 percent of its revenue from the military — this is not the time to be losing big deals like GALE, which brought BBN $16 million in the first year.

Being ejected would be “unthinkable,” said John Makhoul, the head of BBN’s GALE team.

“I cannot entertain that idea right now,” he said several months before DARPA’s first evaluation. “It’s just so drastic that we just don’t think about it.”

GALE commanded about two dozen of BBN’s roughly 400 researchers, so Makhoul felt sure that if DARPA booted BBN, a lot of people would lose their jobs, possibly even him. That sounded like an extreme prospect for one of the leading minds in his field, but Makhoul wasn’t so sure: “Given the pressures the company is under right now, I don’t know.”

Creating the teams
A display in the lobby boasts that BBN is “where wizards work.” The company — formerly called Bolt, Beranek and Newman, its founders — might best be known for its seminal 1960s work on the computer network that became the Internet. More recently, BBN drew acclaim early in the Iraq war when it developed and deployed a sniper-detection system in just two months.

‘This is a little like the making of sausage.’ — David Israel SRI

But the company also is a longtime hub for speech-recognition and translation technologies. In fact, the IBM and SRI teams in GALE were headed by men who had come to their current employers from BBN, where each worked with Makhoul.

Even with all this expertise, BBN, SRI and IBM needed help. In a frenzy of phone calls and e-mails shortly after GALE was announced, representatives from each site raced to line up subcontractors at top university labs around the world — including people who had been rivals during previous government projects.

“This is a little like the making of sausage,” said David Israel, who headed SRI’s team.

BBN nabbed people at Cambridge University, the universities of Maryland and Southern California and a French lab, among others. IBM got Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, Brown and Stanford, plus researchers at Maryland not tied to BBN. SRI’s links included European and Asian schools, Columbia and the universities of California and Washington.

In fact, for all of GALE’s linguistic complexity, it might have paled next to what each team faced merely in combining the work done by the outside people brought aboard. Each partner would focus on particular steps — encoding an aspect of Chinese or Arabic grammar into a computer algorithm, for example.

“We’ve never had a project of this complexity,” BBN researcher Owen Kimball said in April. “You’re going to see people ripping their hair out.”

The GALE evaluation was still months off, but the team — heavily made up of immigrant engineers who had undertaken their own personal language projects in coming to America — was hunkering down.

“Put it this way: You can get your e-mail answered right away at 3 a.m. — by a lot of people,” said computer scientist Long Nguyen.

His colleague Spyros Matsoukas was hoping to do as much as possible before his wife had their third baby in June, right when BBN would be fine-tuning its software for the GALE test. He offered a what-can-you-do sort of smile. The last time BBN faced a huge project deadline, he had to tell his children he couldn’t take them swimming for a while.

Nguyen chimed in that he once slept at the office three nights in a row. That’s nothing, someone added: Rich Schwartz, a longtime BBN researcher, stayed up three nights in a row, no sleep. On multiple occasions.

“He’s too old to do that now,” Makhoul cracked.

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