Linguist’s Ambiguity Tutor and Rehearsal System (LATARS)

BCL plans to research methods to develop Linguist's Ambiguity Tutor and Rehearsal System (LATARS) that trains US military personnel in a new language along with the subtleties of correct semantics of ambiguous, double meaning, and slang phrases. The overall approach will use COTS language specific NLP parsers, lexicons, semantic processing, thematic role assignment, semantic heuristics, single semantic representation and word sense disambiguation techniques to rapidly train systems for the subtleties mentioned above for multiple languages and environments. In its Phase I work, BCL will develop a prototype LATARS for the Arabic language. With the ongoing war against terrorism, understanding the subtleties of Arabic is a key requirement for U.S. military personnel deployed overseas. The prototype system will train on text from emails, chat rooms, voice transcriptions, memos and published documents that will be put in a document repository. At the end of the Phase I research BCL will evaluate the Arabic LATARS for disambiguation, and understanding of slang phrases. In Phase II BCL will work with the Air Force to develop a prototype LATARS for two additional languages. Possible languages of interest include those used by countries potentially working on WMD such as Farsi (Persian), Urdu/Hindi and Korean.