Military Communications and Information Technology: A Trusted ...

Chapter 3: Information Technology for Interoperability and Decision...
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data can be provided by HUMINT, or found on the internet (i.e., OSINT).
Nowadays, media monitoring systems and real time search tools provide
technology to rapidly access data on the internet. From available data sources,
i.e., intelligence document collections or the internet, the specific texts that
may include important information must be extracted. Information retrieval
provides efficient and effective search technology to find the specific documents
that meet the missions identified needs. These documents may be further
filtered according to their relevance. Here, document classification can be
used to determine the documents’ relevance with respect to the mission.
b) Processing and exploitation, and analysis: The documents collected must be processed
to identify and extract information that are important for the mission.
This is an extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive task. For example,
the human analyst has to manually read every document, identify and extract
important information and analyse it with respect to the mission. Information
extraction, text mining and opinion mining are examples of NLP technology
that can assist the intelligence analyst with these tasks. Information extraction
and text mining are related NLP approaches for content analysis. They include
tools for tagging, identification and extraction of specific or mission relevant
information. For example, systems that perform information extraction for
military purposes are described in [12] and [13] as well in [14]. There are also
techniques for the combination of information and for automatic reasoning.
See [15] for an example of such a system. Furthermore, tools for opinion
mining can provide the analyst with information about writers’ attitudes or
sentiments.
NLP can provide the analyst with tools for all intelligence steps that involve
the processing of text. The analyst does not need to read through the documents
manually but can utilize the NLP processing results. To what extent the processing
can be performed automatically by the application of NLP technology depends
on the nature and complexity of the data that needs to be processed, as well as on
the nature and complexity of the NLP task. In any case NLP tools can improve intelligence
processing in terms of speed, of efficiency, and of effectiveness. Moreover
new opportunities will arise as NLP is an active, quickly developing research field.
IV. Statistical machine translation for intelligence purposes
To fully exploit the power of a vast global intelligence source such as the internet
and, in order to access international information in general, documents in different
languages need to be processed. As texts in different languages are relevant not only
in the context of foreign military operations but also for internal security issues,
the translation of text is of fundamental importance for intelligence purposes. In this
context, machine translation (MT) is highly useful. Machine translation denotes
the fully automatic translation of text (or speech).