B -- Research Quality Linquistic Resouces

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Acquisition Management Division, intends to award a sole source acquisition to the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104 for the Information Technology Laboratory, Spoken Language Processing Group (SPLG), for a five-year, not-to exceed $4.9 million, indefinite delivery indefinite quantity contract. The SPLG is currently working with the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency, who has been working with LDC for similar services. This follow-on work is intended to supply NIST with research-quality linguistic resources. The basic requirement will include components such as (but not all inclusive): (1) producing high quality transcripts of recorded, multi-person meetings, (2) producing quick transcripts of recorded multi-person meetings, (3) producing multiple, independent research-oriented translations of contractor-supplied source documents in various languages from appropriate sources from specified time periods, and (4) distribution of Linguistic Data Consortium owned corpora (i.e., collection of linguistic resources) to researchers, (5) producing training data, evaluation data, and correctness assessments in various languages, (6) post-editing of machine translation outputs. The technical requirements to fulfill these components are not met by typical transcription or translation services. Deliverables will require high degrees of accuracy, non-standard textual representations, and precisely controlled content segmentation rules. Furthermore, Component 4 is only distributed by the LDC. As a not-for-profit entity, the LDC is uniquely qualified to prepare these resources in that their staff is highly knowledgeable on the technical and linguistic requirements and they have an established quality control infrastructure that can fulfill the required accuracy, additionally, they maintain a large staff of linguistic academic personnel, and sufficient high performance computational resources needed to complete these tasks. Interested parties capable of responding to the requirement may submit a capability statement specifically identifying their ability to accomplish this requirement. Responses are due within ten days after the publication of this notice. Responses will be reviewed solely for the purpose of determining whether to conduct a competitive procurement. A determination by the Government not to compete this proposed acquisition following consideration of responses to this notice is solely within the discretion of the Government.