IARPA DECIPHER program will be looking at text & voice messages, but could expand to social media, blogs & other digital communications: perspective

IARPA, the US spy tech agency, is looking to make sense of new slang, jargon, specialized terms, and other coded language in both text and speech with its DECIPHER program. 

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In April, the  Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) announced the launch of five new innovative research programs designed to bolster national security.

For IARPA's DECIPHER program, the goal is to analyze and make sense of  communications that contain what they call "complex or cryptic language," which basically refers to slang, jargon, acronyms, and coded phrases.

"DECIPHER will infer potential meanings from (often limited) contextual information and provide translation and annotation of specialized terms, including jargon, slang, and acronyms, in texts and speech"IARPA, DECIPHER Program, April 2026

"DECIPHER will flag and extract candidate specialized terms in a document or corpus, and then will provide candidate plain language translation and annotation of specialized terms, including jargon, slang, and acronyms"IARPA, DECIPHER Program, April 2026