The goal of the Low Resource Languages for Emergent Incidents (LORELEI) Program is to dramatically advance the state of computational linguistics and human language technology to enable rapid, low-cost development of capabilities for low-resource languages. These capabilities will be exercised to provide situational awareness based on information from any language, in support of emergent missions such as humanitarian assistance/disaster relief, peacekeeping, or infectious disease response.
The LORELEI Program aims to change this state of affairs by targeting research and development of human language technology that eliminates the current reliance on huge, manually-translated, manually-transcribed, or manually-annotated corpora and turns instead to leveraging language universal resources, projecting from related-language resources, and fully exploiting a broad range of language-specific resources. The technologies resulting from LORELEI research will be capable of supporting situational awareness based on low-resource foreign language sources within an extremely short time frame – starting as soon as 24 hours after a new language requirement emerges. With the understanding that even with perfect translation, there would still be too much material for analysts to use effectively, LORELEI research will not be focused solely on Machine Translation. While LORELEI technologies may include partial or full Automated Speech Recognition and/or Machine Translation, the overall goal will not be translating foreign language material into English, but providing situational awareness by identifying elements of information in foreign language and English sources, such as topics, names, events, sentiment, and relationships.