Military Communications and Information Technology: A Trusted ...

Automatic Exploitation of Multilingual Information
for Military Intelligence Purposes
Sandra Noubours, Matthias Hecking
Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics FKIE,
D-53343Wachtberg, Germany, {sandra.noubours, matthias.hecking}@fkie.fraunhofer.de
Abstract: Intelligence plays an important role in supporting military operations. In the course
of military intelligence a vast amount of textual data in different languages needs to be analyzed.
In addition to information provided by traditional military intelligence, nowadays the internet offers
important resources of potential militarily relevant information. However, we are not able to manually
handle this vast amount of data. The science of natural language processing (NLP) provides technology
to efficiently handle this task, in particular by means of machine translation and text mining.
In our research project ISAF-MT we created a statistical machine translation (SMT) system for Dari
to German. In this paper we describe how NLP technologies and in particular SMT can be applied
to different intelligence processes. We therefore argue that multilingual NLP technology can strongly
support military operations.
Keywords: Statistical machine translation, natural language processing, open source intelligence,
military intelligence
I. Introduction
Military operations strongly depend on up-to-date information. This is necessary
to be able to act in the most effective and coordinated way possible at any given
time. Therefore relevant information must be provided by military intelligence cells
operating according to a specific process. This process includes collection, processing
and analysis of information. Information which is important for military purposes
can come in a variety of forms, e.g., signals, geospatial data, audio and video files
or textual data. In this paper we will focus on the processing of text.
In addition to intelligence provided by humans (HUMINT), nowadays open
source intelligence (OSINT), particularly in terms of exploiting the internet, has become
an essential source of potentially relevant information [1]. Live information
from global news sites and user-generated content can now provide us with important
knowledge. Terrorist organizations present in the web make the internet
even more interesting from a military point of view. Consequently, we have access
to a vast amount of data, which imposes great challenges to information processing