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Raytheon subsidiary BBN Technologies will develop new methods for processing handwritten text for the the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Raytheon announced Monday.
BBN has been a part of the agency’s multilingual automatic document classification, analysis and translation program for four years.
The subsidiary’s team aims to create a prototype system that provides translations to military commands and personnel and can automatically convert foreign language text images into English transcripts without analysts and linguists.
Prem Natarajan, head of speech and language processing at BBN, said in a release that foreign language translation in the battlefield is currently slow, expensive and difficult to access.
Researchers will also work to refine a laptop-deployable prototype translation system and integrate optical character recognition with BBN's distillation and translation techniques.
