The Computational Cultural Understanding (CCU) program is a research program from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to create human language technologies that will provide effective dialogue assistance to monolingual operators in cross-cultural interactions. CCU consists of technology development and testing for two Technical Areas (TA): TA1 Sociocultural Analysis, and TA2 Cross-Cultural Dialogue Assistance. TA1 technologies are component technologies supportive of the TA2 application and focus on sociocultural norms discovery, cross-cultural emotion recognition, and detection of impactful changes in sociocultural norms and emotions. TA2 is a framework for a sociocultural dialogue assistant to help monolingual operators have successful interactions in cross-cultural settings.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is organizing a smaller scale evaluation open to researchers outside of the CCU program who want to participate in a particular technology development in CCU.
The first open evaluation focuses on detection of social norms in video recordings of interactions between two or more people in Mandarin Chinese. This evaluation plan describes the task, data, metrics, data format, submission protocol, and schedule (v0.5 April 16, 2024).
Please visit the OpenCCU Evaluation page at https://sat.nist.gov/openccu to register to participate in this evaluation.
nist_ccu [at] nist.gov (nist_ccu[at]nist[dot]gov)