DARPA Computational Cultural Understanding (CCU) Program

The goal of the two-phase Computational Cultural Understanding (CCU) program by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) is to create human language technologies that will provide effective dialogue assistance to monolingual operators in cross-cultural interactions. Please review the CCU Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) for more detailed information on the program.

CCU prescribes technology development and testing for two Technical Areas (TA):

• TA1 - Sociocultural Analysis: 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 - Cross-Cultural Dialogue Assistance: TA2 is a framework for a sociocultural dialogue assistant to help monolingual operators to have successful interactions in cross-cultural settings.

NIST is tasked to evaluate system performance on TA1 and TA2 research tasks.

Phase 1

The evaluation plan for Phase 1 linked below outlines the evaluation methodology, including evaluation task definitions, metrics, and file formats:

• DARPA CCU Phase 1 Evaluation Plan (last updated February 21, 2023)

Contact

Please email nist_ccu [at] nist.gov (nist_ccu[at]nist[dot]gov) for any questions or comments regarding the evaluations for the CCU program.