April 28th, 1998 4pm
The FALCon Testbed: OCR, MT and Multi-lingual Retreival

Barbara Broome, Ann Brodeen, Clare Voss, Chris Schlesiger
Army Research Laboratory

ABSTRACT

In today's Army, soldiers are expected to use sophistocated computing technology under noisy and dangerous conditions. With little or no prior language training, they must operate in a multi-national environment. ARL's language research program seeks to provide more natural and effective methods for accomplishing multi-lingual communication tasks. The program emphasizes the use of testbeds to focus research on the barriers to satisfying specific user requirements. This talk will describe our experience with the FALCon testbed, used to support troops in Bosnia and Haiti.

PRESENTATION OUTLINE

Program Overview with Demo (Broome/Schlesiger), System Evaluation Issues and OCR (Brodeen) Machine Translation and Multi-lingual Retrieval (Voss )

PRESENTERS

The ARL FALCon team includes researchers in the fields of computer science, engineering, linguistics, psychology, and statistics. Today's presenters include: Ms Barbara Broome, who leads the Intelligent Systems Branch of the Army Reseach Laboratory (ARL); Ms Ann Brodeen, responsible for test design and evaluation on the FALCon program; Dr. Clare Voss, who leads the research effort in multi-lingual computing; and Mr. Chris Schlesiger, who leads the software integration effort for multi-lingual testbed development.