The operational warfighter is inundated with information in narrative text, such as reports, email and chat, and the resulting task overload can preclude timely processing and exploitation of information. Artificial intelligence (AI) offers a promising approach to this problem, however the cost of handcrafting information within the narrow confines of first order logic or other AI formalisms is currently prohibitive for many applications.

The Machine Reading program aims to address this issue by replacing expert and associated knowledge engineers with un-supervised or self-supervised learning systems that can ”read” natural text and insert it into AI knowledge bases (i.e., data stores especially encoded to support subsequent machine reasoning). If successful, the Machine Reading program will produce language-understanding technology that will automatically process text in timelines consistent with operational tempo.

The Machine Research program is in its final phase and is expected to conclude at the end of FY 2012. The program developed and evaluated numerous innovative prototypes and has laid the technical foundation for future research and development in operational-scale language-understanding capabilities.