A--PRE-SOLICITATION NOTICE FOR BROAD AGENCY ANNOUNCEMENT (BAA) FOR SOCIO-CULTURAL CONTENT IN LANGUAGE (SCIL) PROGRAM FOR IARPA

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is planning to solicit proposals for the SCIL (Socio-Cultural Content in Language) Program through the Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) process. IARPA's SCIL Program is seeking innovative, creative, cutting-edge research to achieve advancements in technologies that significantly expand human language understanding. As a mirror of socio-cultural norms and principles, language reflects people's beliefs, goals, intentions and relationships. This R&D program intends to explore automated methods of correlating socio-cultural features with human language indicators. The goal of the program is to develop new approaches to expanding our knowledge of context, meaning and identity. The unit of analysis for the initial efforts in this program is social groups. These groups do not have to be named groups but should be made up of 2 to n participants (speakers/authors and audience) that have on-going interactions. The socio-cultural phenomena and goals that groups might display include leadership, influence, coercion, recruitment, sentiment, intent, emerging behaviors, role of religion, group cohesion and state of membership (e.g., initiate, long-term). The program is interested in providing evidence from the language used by group participants of such socio-cultural phenomena. It is the ultimate goal of the SCIL Program to discover, characterize and automate the correlation of a wide range of socio-cultural phenomena of groups with evidence from the language used by those groups. The SCIL Program is generally not interested in enhancing or continuing the standard work done in Information or Content Extraction, Social Network Analysis nor Data Mining. SCIL program is envisioned as a five-year program. Year 1, which will begin in mid-2008, will involve exploratory efforts to define the problem, to investigate new and creative ways of advancing deep language understanding and to prototype the findings. It is projected that multiple contracts will be awarded at funding levels adequate to support robust exploratory work. Two phases of two years each are projected for expanding the capabilities explored in Year 1 of the program. The solicitation will be open to all research and development organizations located in the U.S., including large and small businesses, academic and eligible non-profit and not-for-profit institutions and collaborative ventures from mixed sources. The Department of Interior, National Business Center (NBC), Acquisition Services Directorate, Sierra Vista Branch at Fort Huachuca, AZ plans to issue this solicitation on behalf of and in coordination with the IARPA. The BAA for Year I of SCIL will be released on or about February 1, 2008 at the following NBC web site: http://www.nbc.gov/acquisition/fort_h/solicit.html -link will be titled SCIL Public comments/questions on the BAA will be accepted through February 15, 2008. These must be submitted in writing to the following e-mail address: [email protected] referencing the title of the program SCIL in the subject line. Potential offerors are requested to provide POC information, company name, mailing address, phone number, and email address with their questions. Answers will be posted as quickly as possible on the NBC web site above. The contracting office POC is Inna Lloyd at [email protected] or phone (520) 533-5248.