US Spy Researchers Want to Build Software that Understands Metaphors
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is challenging researchers to build systems to identify and understand metaphors in multiple languages. The software would then help the user understand the cultural underpinnings of the speakers:
IARPA wants some computer scientists with experience in processing language in big chunks to come up with methods of pulling out a culture’s relationship with particular concepts.”They really are trying to get at what people think using how they talk,” Benjamin Bergen, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego, told me. Bergen is one of a dozen or so lead researchers who are expected to vie for a research grant that could be worth tens of millions of dollars over five years, if the team scan show progress towards automatically tagging and processing metaphors across languages.
Put simply:
Teams will try to build a metaphor machine that can convert a language into underlying truths about a culture. Feed text in one end and wait on the other end of the Rube Goldberg software for a series of beliefs about family or America or power.
(Via the Atlantic)
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