Argamon Team Receives IARPA Grant

A research team led by Professor Shlomo Argamon has been awarded a multi-year contract by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), administered by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, with first-year funding of $1,382,812. The project, named Autonomous Dynamic Analysis of Metaphor and Analogy (ADAMA) aims to build a system that identifies metaphorical speech in American English, Iranian Farsi, Mexican Spanish, and Russian.

Metaphors are pervasive in everyday language and contain much information about how people in a culture define and understand the world. ADAMA will build a repository of metaphors identified through an automated analysis of huge amounts of online data, refined by psychological and cultural experts. This repository could have applications in a number of areas including forensics, intelligence analysis, business analysis, sociological research, and communication studies.

The members of the research team come from IIT; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Georgetown University; Ben-Gurion University of the Negev; Bar-Ilan University; and the Center for Advanced Defense Studies in Washington DC.