The

IARPA The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is an organization within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence responsible for leading research to overcome difficult challenges relevant to the United States Intellige ...

Babel program developed

speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the ma ...

technology for noisy telephone conversations. The main goal of the program was to improve the performance of keyword search on languages with very little transcribed data, i.e. low-resource languages. Data from 26 languages was collected with certain languages being held-out as "surprise" languages to test the ability of the teams to rapidly build a system for a new language. Beginning in 2012, two industry-led teams ( IBM and BBN) and two university-led teams ( ICSI led by Nelson Morgan and CMU) participated. The IBM team included

University of Cambridge , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

and

RWTH Aachen University RWTH Aachen University (), also known as North Rhine-Westphalia Technical University of Aachen, Rhine-Westphalia Technical University of Aachen, Technical University of Aachen, University of Aachen, or ''Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hoch ...

, while BBN's team included

Brno University of Technology Brno University of Technology (abbreviated: ''BUT''; in Czech: Vysoké učení technické v Brně – Czech abbreviation: ''VUT'') is a university located in Brno, Czech Republic. Being founded in 1899 and initially offering a single cours ...

Johns Hopkins University Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hemisphere. It consiste ...

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

and LIMSI. Only BBN and IBM made it to the final evaluation campaign in 2016, in which BBN won by achieving the highest keyword search accuracy on the evaluation language. Some of the funding from Babel was used to further develop the

Kaldi Kaldi or Khalid was a legendary Arab Ethiopian goatherd who discovered the coffee plant around 850 CE, according to popular legend, show some artwork depicting him, after which it entered the Islamic world and then the rest of the world. Story I ...

toolkit. The speech data was later made available through the

Linguistic Data Consortium The Linguistic Data Consortium is an open consortium of universities, companies and government research laboratories. It creates, collects and distributes speech and text databases, lexicons, and other resources for linguistics research and develo ...

at a symbolic cost of $25 USD per language pack.

References

{{Reflist DARPA