Computational Cultural Understanding (CCU)

Task Coordinators: CCU Team

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is organizing a smaller scale evaluation open to researchers outside of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Computational Cultural Understanding (CCU) program who want to participate in a particular technology development in CCU. This first open evaluation focuses on the detection of sociocultural norms in video recordings of interactions between two or more people in Mandarin Chinese. Successful communication entails not only knowing the local language but also understanding the local cultures and customs. Violation of cultural norms may derail a conversation and lead to disastrous consequences. As such detecting social norms and determining if a speaker is adhering or violating them are a foundational component in dialogue assistance applications to facilitate successful communication between individuals who do not speak a common language and are not familiar with each other’s culture. Successful development of this capability is a component in one of the technical areas that the DARPA CCU program seeks to develop to provide effective dialogue assistance to monolingual operators in cross-cultural interactions.

Task Guidelines

For more detailed information about the tasks, dataset, and evaluation framework, please refer to the detailed task guidelines page HERE. For more information, contact nist_ccu@nist.gov.