SAN DIEGO, July 8 (UPI) -- The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has contracted Science Applications International Corp. to support the agency's Machine Reading Program.
U.S. company SAIC was awarded the contract from DARPA and the Air Force Research Laboratory. Under the more than $13 million deal, SAIC will develop the research framework for developing reading system technologies for applications in the defense and intelligence communities.
SAIC will also conduct analysis to evaluate the reading system technologies' performance in support of DARPA's Machine Reading program, an initiative to develop machines to "understand text by bridging the gap between human textual representations and those used by machine reasoning systems," a news release said.
"The goal of the program is to create general purpose reading systems which can ingest, understand, and make inferences from the mountains of text that collectively encode vast stores of knowledge inaccessible to current technology," John Fratamico, SAIC senior vice president and business unit general manager, said in a statement.
