ALADAN is an EU European Defence Fund 2021 project that aims to design and develop an innovative framework for AI-based language solutions in the defence sector. The framework will provide the MoDs with cutting-edge defence skills, such as multilingual speech identification and recognition, spoken term search, and text/speech translation.
ALADAN seeks to address several challenges, such as:
- Civilian language technology solutions are not suitable for the defence domain (due to differences in acoustic environment, languages, accents, and specific tasks).
- AI solutions require large amounts of properly annotated training data, but obtaining classified data for defence applications is difficult and costly.
- The development of language technology with confidential training data is challenging due to data availability limitations and working environment restrictions.
- In most cases for defence applications the operational data is very limited and often classified:
- involvement of only duly authorized staff (but may need personnel with specific language skills);
- need to use qualified premises and computing environment;
- the resulting models are classified and cannot be shared across applications;
- very high development costs and delays.
The novel framework, Open-Domain Training for In-Domain Target (ODT-IDT), will primarily rely on the use of multidomain and selected open-source data for training while targeting in-domain data, using only a small amount of application-specific data for validation. By utilizing this approach, the project aims to substantially reduce both the time and the financial costs of developing language technologies for military applications, thereby drastically reducing the barriers for their wider uptake.
The project officially started on December 1st, 2022 and will run for 42 months.
The project partners are 4 SMEs from 4 EU counties, embarking on a new collaboration with complementary expertise:
- Vocapia Research (Coordinator, France)
- Crowdee (Germany)
- Lingea (Czech Republic)
- Ianus Consulting (Cyprus)
