SOURCES SOUGHT
R -- SOURCES SOUGHT FOR SEMANTIC COHERENCE
- Notice Date
- 4/12/2018
- Notice Type
- Sources Sought
- NAICS
- 541690
— Other Scientific and Technical Consulting Services
- Contracting Office
- Department of Commerce, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Acquisition Management Division, 100 Bureau Drive, Building 301, Room B130, Gaithersburg, Maryland, 20899-1410, United States
- ZIP Code
- 20899-1410
- Solicitation Number
- AMD-SS18-01915
- Archive Date
- 5/4/2018
- Point of Contact
- Lynda M Horton, Phone: 3019753725, Keith Bubar, Phone: 3019758329
- E-Mail Address
-
Lynda.Horton@nist.gov, keith.bubar@nist.gov
(Lynda.Horton@nist.gov, keith.bubar@nist.gov)
- Small Business Set-Aside
- N/A
- Description
- INTRODUCTION This is a Sources Sought notice. This is NOT a solicitation for proposals, proposal abstracts, or quotations. The purpose of this notice is to obtain information regarding the availability and capability of qualified business sources. Your responses to the information requested will assist the Government in determining the appropriate acquisition method, including whether a set-aside is possible. NIST is seeking responses from all responsible sources, including large, foreign, and small businesses. Small businesses are defined under the associated NAICS code for this effort, 541690 Other Scientific and Technical Consulting Services, as those domestic sources having 15 million or less annually. Please include your company's size classification and socio-economic status in any response to this notice. NOTE: This notice is strictly for obtaining Market Research. There will be no Question & Answer period under this Sources Sought Notice. Background/Mission: NIST is supporting evaluation activities for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Active Interpretation of Disparate Alternatives (AIDA) program. The AIDA program envisions a system that extracts information from text, video, and audio, collects that information into a knowledge base, and allows analysts to query the knowledge base. The extractions will be noisy and conflicting, due to the state of the art in extraction technology as well as active disinformation efforts. As a result, the knowledge base will not be consistent, and the analyst needs to be able to understand how different pieces of information influence different hypotheses about the data in the knowledge base. The analyst also brings their own hypotheses which they need to be able to set as background to a query. Technical Area (TA) 3 of the AIDA program requires AIDA performers to produce hypotheses for the analyst that are semantically coherent. The notion of semantic coherence is ill-defined, but broadly means that the hypothesis doesn't contradict itself, contains only pertinent information, and is comprehensible to the analyst. AIDA performers will propose measures of semantic coherence, but in order to evaluate TA3, NIST needs to develop an independent measure of semantic coherence. NIST wants this measure to reflect an analyst-relevant perspective (user-focused coherence), rather than measures of the structure of the hypothesis only (system-focused coherence). Scope of Work The contractor shall work with the US Intelligence Community to elicit requirements and factors for a measure of semantic coherence. The contractor shall propose measures of semantic coherence that are informed by those interactions and the requirements and factors coming from them, as well as the contractor's understanding of the state of the art in information extraction, knowledge representation and reasoning, and probabilistic knowledge bases. The final deliverable shall be an unclassified report on the outcomes of the analyst interactions and recommendations for one or more measures of semantic coherence. Potential Tasks The contractor shall: 1. Conduct interviews, focus groups, or meetings with analysts in the intelligence community whose work process closely matches the AIDA application, in order to determine requirements and factors for a measure of the semantic coherence of a hypothesis. In the course of developing analysis products which present hypotheses regarding the world, analysts tend to prefer hypotheses that are semantically coherent. Semantic coherence is not strongly defined but broadly means that the hypothesis does not contradict itself, contains only pertinent information, and is comprehensible to the analyst. Different workflows and processes may evoke different requirements or factors of semantic coherence. The contractor shall determine these factors through interactions with appropriate analysts, and determine how those requirements and factors can be identified given a candidate hypothesis. 2. Propose one or more measures of semantic coherence informed by those interviews, focus groups, or meetings. These measures shall quantify the semantic coherence of a hypothesis numerically, based on a manual (human) coding of the factors of semantic coherence in the hypothesis. These measures shall allow hypotheses to be compared to one another on the basis of semantic coherence, as identified by the factors and as quantified by the measure. Potential Deliverables Task description Format Quantity (1) Report on semantic coherence findings from analyst interactions. PDF 1 (2) Recommendations on the design of measures of semantic coherence. PDF 1 or more RESPONSE INFORMATION In order for a contractor to clearly convey their capability to fulfill the above-identified need, they MUST SUBMIT the following information. It is preferred that Capability Statements address each of the components in the order in which they are listed below. Please provide information regarding the following: 1. Companies that provide the services with the desired capabilities must submit a detailed capability statement, addressing all of the specifications discussed above, in an organized format (preferably in the same order as listed above) that allows for a direct correlation to the requested information. 2. Any other relevant information that is not listed above which the Government should consider in developing its minimum specifications and finalizing its market research. 3. Describe the services availability to the public, are the services rendered commercially available to all public? Each response shall include the following Business Information: 1. Name of the company that provides services for which services are provided 2. Name, title, telephone number, and e-mail addresses of individuals who can verify the demonstrated capabilities identified in the responses. 3. Business size for NAICS 541690 (15 million) and status, if qualified as an 8(a) firm (must be certified by SBA), Small Disadvantaged Business (must be certified by SBA), Woman-Owned Small Business, HUBZone firm (must be certified by SBA), and/or Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (must be listed in the VetBiz Contractor Information Pages). 4. DUNS number, CAGE Code, Tax Identification Number, and company structure (Corporation, LLC, partnership, joint venture, etc.). Companies also must be registered in the System for Award Management (SAM www.sam.gov ) to be considered as potential sources. 5. Identification of the firm's GSA Schedule contract(s) by Schedule number and contract number and SINs that are applicable to this potential requirement are also requested. SUBMISSION INFORMATION Responses must be submitted no later than April 19, 2018 at 11:00AM, EST. Capability statements will not be returned and will not be accepted after the due date. GENERAL INFORMATION As previously stated, the Government will not entertain questions regarding this Market Research; however, general questions may be forwarded to the following: Contracts Specialist: Lynda Horton Email Address: Lynda.Horton@nist.gov Phone: 301-975-3725 Contracting Officer: Keith Bubar Email Address: Keith.Bubar@nist.gov "Disclaimer and Important Notes. This notice does not obligate the Government to award a contract or otherwise pay for the information provided in response. The Government reserves the right to use information provided by respondents for any purpose deemed necessary and legally appropriate. Any organization responding to this notice should ensure that its response is complete and sufficiently detailed to allow the Government to determine the organization's qualifications to perform the work. Respondents are advised that the Government is under no obligation to acknowledge receipt of the information received or provide feedback to respondents with respect to any information submitted. After a review of the responses received, a pre-solicitation synopsis and solicitation may be published in Federal Business Opportunities. However, responses to this notice will not be considered adequate responses to a solicitation. Confidentiality. No proprietary, classified, confidential, or sensitive information should be included in your response. The Government reserves the right to use any non-proprietary technical information in any resultant solicitation(s)."
- Web Link
-
FBO.gov Permalink
(https://www.fbo.gov/spg/DOC/NIST/AcAsD/AMD-SS18-01915/listing.html)
- Place of Performance
- Address: 100 Bureau Drive, Gaithersburg, Maryland, 20899, United States
- Zip Code: 20899
- Zip Code: 20899
- Record
- SN04887438-W 20180414/180412230833-f9ae042984a291685e3c755122764ab7 (fbodaily.com)
- Source
-
FedBizOpps Link to This Notice
(may not be valid after Archive Date)
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