PRESOL | A | Research on English and Foriegn Language Exploitation (REFLEX)

FBO DAILY ISSUE OF MARCH 14, 2004 FBO #0839
SOLICITATION NOTICE

A -- Research on English and Foriegn Language Exploitation (REFLEX)

Notice Date: 3/12/2004
Notice Type: Solicitation Notice
Contracting Office: DOI - NBC, Ft. Huachuca AZ P.O. Box 12924 ATTN: Gloria Golden 520-538-0418 Fort Huachuca AZ 85670
ZIP Code: 85670
Solicitation Number: BAA-04-01-FH
Response Due: 3/5/2007
Archive Date: 3/12/2005
Point of Contact: Roy Peters Contracting Officer's Rep. 5205380409 Roy_L_Peters@nbc.gov;
E-Mail Address: Email your questions to Point of Contact above, or if none listed, contact the IDEAS EC HELP DESK for assistance
(EC_helpdesk@NBC.GOV)
Small Business Set-Aside: N/A
Description: I. INTRODUCTION: The Department of the Interior, National Business Center (NBC), Acquisition and Property Management Division, Southwest Branch, Fort Huachuca AZ, acting as the contracting agent for the Intelligence Technology Innovation Center (ITIC) and other Intelligence Community, Defense, and Homeland Security agencies, invites the submission of research proposals for developing technology that partially or fully automates aspects of the process of acquiring information from text documents and other natural language-based sources. Government information analysts need dramatic improvements over today's capabilities in order to be able to accomplish their analytic tasks in the future. This Research Program is seeking to develop innovative algorithms, technologies, linguistic resources, and linguistic resource methodologies to address the program goals. This broad area announcement (BAA) seeks focused research efforts that advance the state of the art in Natural Language Processing technologies for English, Arabic, Chinese, and certain other major or less-commonly taught languages (LCTL). The following Research Areas address the Program's goals:<OL> <LI> Partial Semantic Content Processing for Entities, including Entity Detection and Tracking (EDT) or Information Extraction (IE) of Entities; name parsing, translation and transliteration; entity-based document clustering and summarization <LI> Partial Semantic Content Processing for Relations, including Relation Detection and Tracking (RDT) or Relation Extraction; relation-based document clustering and summarization. <LI> Partial Semantic Content Processing for Events. Event Detection and Tracking or Event Extraction <LI> "Full" Semantic Content Processing, including representation of document content in a logical form or other representation language; full-document machine translation (MT) <LI> Linguistic Resource Creation and Validation, including mass production of corpora and annotated corpora, lexicons, and certain basic Natural Language Processing (NLP) components for LCTLs; lexical and semantic resources such as ontologies and wordnets; training and testing resources to support Tasks 1-4 <LI> Evaluation Methodology Research, for each of the above categories </OL> Research in a number of areas may be needed to address program goals, including Machine Translation, Information Extraction, Semantic Analysis, and certain aspects of Text Summarization and Document Clustering. For this BAA, each of the above Research Areas is subdivided into specific areas of research. For greater detail, see the Proposal Information Pamphlet at <A HREF=http://www.nbc.gov/reflex.html>http://www.nbc.gov/reflex.html.</A> This BAA anticipates the award of multiple proposals. Awards will be determined by availability of funds, so not all proposals rated as selectable will be funded. Awards will not necessarily be made for each of the Research Areas listed above. II. OBJECTIVES: The National Business Center is soliciting research proposals to advance the process of converting information from documents and other language-based sources into forms that can best be used in the analytic process. These "documents" can be in English or one or more foreign languages; they could be written text, or spoken or image data that has been converted into text or text-like form via ASR or OCR; they could be in a range of genres; and they could be on a variety of topics or domains. There are two broad use cases where this research program's technology will be used.<UL> <LI> Assistance to information analysts: Automated tools will assist human analysts in judging, quickly and accurately, the utility of individual documents in English or one or more foreign languages, and of clusters of documents that are related topically or along certain other dimensions; and in identifying specific facts or other items of interest from single documents or sets/clusters of documents. A long-term goal is to allow the human analyst to be able to perform accurate information analysis from an automatically-produced English-language translation or from an automatically-produced condensed English-language textual or non-textual rendition (summary) of a document or document cluster, instead of from the foreign language original(s). <LI> Input to automated analytic tools: Automated technology will generate fully structured, language-independent representations of information as input to analytic tools; this representation would be based on unstructured information conveyed in a single document or a document cluster in English or one or more foreign languages. The analytic tools include various knowledge-base population or analysis tools, social network analysis tools, and the like.</UL> III. GENERAL INFORMATION An individual proposal may address a number of subtopics of research areas identified in the Proposal Information Pamphlet, at the URL given above. An individual proposal must identify explicitly which Research Areas sections, subsections, and subsubsections (where given) are being addressed. However, each proposal must show a coherent project direction in the range of tasks covered. Multiple proposals, each covering a specific research direction (potentially tasks from multiple Research Areas, sections, and subsections, etc.) may be submitted by a single offeror. However, where multiple Research Areas sections, subsections, and subsubsections are addressed, separate technical, cost and deliverable information must be provided for the work proposed. The REFLEX Program is 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; collaborative ventures from mixed sources; and Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs). Teaming between industry, independent research centers and academia is encouraged, and commercial technology may be leveraged wherever possible. According to DFARS 235.017-1, certain Federal Labs may submit proposals. For eligible Federal Labs, partnering with a university or private company is not required. From DFARS 235.017-1: <cite> "DoD-sponsored FFRDC's that function primarily as research laboratories (C3I Laboratory operated by the Institute for Defense Analysis, Lincoln Laboratory operated by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Software Engineering Institute) may respond to solicitations and announcements for programs which promote research, development, demonstration, or transfer of technology (Section 217, Pub.L.103-337)."</cite> DoD- and DOE-sponsored FFRDCs may also respond to this BAA. The full list of DoD-and DOE-sponsored FFRDCs is maintained by the <A HREF=http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/nsf03308/start.htm>National Science Foundation</A>. The Federal Acquisiton Regulation (FAR) Part 27 applies to the Government's rights to data. Period of Performance: Phase 1 shall be a basic period not to exceed 24 months after contract award and incrementally funded annually afterwards. Phase 2 shall be for a period not to exceed 12 months and be exercised as an option in at the end of Phase 1. Individual Awards: Awards are expected to be in the range of $100K to $1,000K per year. The amount of the award will vary according to the type of effort undertaken. This BAA will remain open for 3 years after the publishing date. The first round deadline is 30 April 2004. Information in this BAA is supplemented by a Proposer Information Pamphlet (PIP) that provides further information on the eligibility, support, research areas, approaches, preparation and submission of proposals, and selection criteria. It is available on the World Wide Web at <A HREF=http://www.nbc.gov/reflex.html>http://www.nbc.gov/reflex.html</A>. This Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) (BAA-04-01-FH), in conjuction with the PIP discussed above, constitutes the entire solicitation for this effort. No additional information is available, nor will a formal request for proposal or other solicitation regarding this notice be issued, requests for the same will be disregarded. IV. PROPOSAL PREPARATION INSTRUCTIONS: See the Proposer Information Pamphlet (PIP) which provides preparation and submission instructions for proposals. It is available on the web site listed above. V. PROPOSAL SUBMISSION: Proposals are due on or before 4:00 PM, Mountain Standard Time, (Note that Arizona does not observe Daylight Savings Time) 30 April 2004 to the Department of the Interior, National Business Center, Acquisition and Property Management Division, Southwest Branch, Post Office Box 12924, ATTN: BAA 04-01-FH (Roy Peters), Fort Huachuca, Arizona, 85670-2924. Proposals which are hand-carried or delivered by overnight express carrier (such as Federal Express or United Parcel Service) are also due on or before 4:00 PM, Mountain Standard Time, 30 April 2004 to the Department of the Interior, National Business Center, Acquisition and Property Management Division, Southwest Branch, Second Floor, Building 22208 Augur Street, ATTN: BAA 04-01-FH (Roy Peters), Fort Huachuca, Arizona, 85613-6000. Proposals must be submitted in accordance with the requirements and procedures identified in this BAA and the PIP. To be considered, full proposals (in original, one copy, and electronic media) must be received. Proposals submitted by fax or electronic mail are not acceptable and WILL NOT BE CONSIDERED. Proposals and/or proposal modifications received after the proposal submission closing date and time will be handled IAW FAR 15.208. Proposals not adhering to the form and format required by this BAA WILL NOT BE CONSIDERED. The Government anticipates completing the evaluation process within 60 days after receipt of proposals. The award of contractual instrument(s) will follow 60 days after that. VI. PROPOSAL EVALUATION: Proposals will be selected through a technical/scientific/business decision process with technical and scientific considerations being most important. Evaluations will be performed using the following criteria listed in descending order of relative importance. Each period of the effort (base and options) must demonstrate these contributions independently and collectively. Proposals unresponsive to the Research Areas addressed in the BAA will not be fully evaluated and will not be considered for award. <UL> <LI>Overall scientific and/or technical merit, including technical approach, degree of innovation, understanding of the technical issues, and evaluation plan. If a proposal lacks overall scientific and/or technical merit, it will not be further considered for award. <LI>The proposed effort's potential contributions to the stated program goals. <LI>The offeror's capabilities, related experience, facilities, techniques, or unique combinations of these, which are integral factors for achieving proposal objectives; qualifications, capabilities, and experience of key personnel, and the offeror's record of present and past performance. <LI>Cost reasonableness and realism </UL> Awards under this BAA will be made to responsible offerors on the basis of the evaluation criteria above and a BEST VALUE approach to the Government. Awards will be subject to the availability of funds. Awards may take the form of a procurement contract, grant, or cooperative agreement, depending upon the nature of the proposed work, the required degree of interaction between parties, and other factors. The Government reserves the right to select for award all, some, one or none of the proposals received and to incrementally fund any award instrument. The Government also reserves the right to fund all or any part of a proposal evaluated as eligible for award.
Web Link: Please click here to view more details.
(http://ideasec.nbc.gov/ecprod/owa/ec$cbd.sypfirstcount?P_SERVER_ID3=NB1401FH&P_OBJ_ID1=151734)
Record: SN00544106-W 20040314/040312220033 (fbodaily.com)
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A -- Research on English and Foriegn Language Exploitation (REFLEX)