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Natural Language Processing for State Security
Roland Piquepaille writes "Obviously, computers can't have an opinion. What computers are very good at, though, is scanning through text to deduct human opinions from factual information. This branch of natural-language processing (NLP) is called 'information extraction' and is used for sorting facts and opinions for Homeland Security. Right now, a consortium of three universities is for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) which doesn't have enough in-house expertise in NLP. Read more for additional references and a diagram showing how information extraction is used."
! troll
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
The slippery slope to being automatically flagged as someone to watch out for. No human control in the process, but one day when you go to apply for a loan or get your drivers' licence renewed, you might get a surprise.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Number 891224 has expressed a dislike of Emperor Bush, incident reported to FBI and Homeland Security.
Great Intellect...
I would say that comptuers (sic) aren't very good at deducting human opinions yet. They _may_ become better. Are humans good at deducting other humans opinion yet?
I just can't be bothered.
I have, in agregate, spent about 3 1/2 years in the last 20 years working on using NLP for semantic information extraction.
Possible? Yes, given very narrow domains of discourse and lots of work.
There goes a promising career path. I know any technology can be used for good or for evil, but in today's political climate, it seems especially irresponsible to be aiding and abetting what may wind up becoming the pretext for torture of some 16 year old blogger.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to prepare myself for my upcoming extraordinary rendition....
Why do I immediately assume this will be abused?
DHS officer: Mr. 100%, I'm afraid we'll have to take you into custody. Our information extraction search on your blog concluded you are anti-American.
Me: From my blog? Is this about my criticism of the Iraq war?
DHS officer: Our results are classified, but please accompany us to GTMO for further "information extraction" to confirm the results of our investigation...
Ok, I know I'm taking a very cynical view here and that's pretty full of FUD, but why else does State security need this? Is this for them to monitor every chat room and blog?
Not to mention, he linked to the almost EXACT same blogs he did last night in his Hydrogen junk article, tisk tisk Roland. You can mod us offtopic all you want man, just checking the last article proves he is scamming Slashdot (and it's users) for ad clicks for these blogs and his own.
,and his ad carriers have some deadline to beat?
;/
Let us filter this guy please. Seriously, I will stop subscribing and so will my usergroup if we can't filter out his faux science crap. It's getting near the end of the month Slashdot, do you, Roland
In case anyone was wondering why some of us keep bitching, it's because we have NO other way to get our point across short of no more subscribing here! Some of us actually like to discuss REAL science, not this crap Roland keeps getting on the front page here. We can't filter it, so we get raped by his ads and ad partners, OR we ignore science here on Slashdot and get real bored real fast
What comptuers are very good at, though, is scanning through text to deduct human opinions from factual information.
... aims to teach computers to scan through text and sort opinion from fact. Or, We're interested in seeing how we would extract information about opinions.
Funny, because neither of the articles state that. In fact, they don't even say that software can do that at all yet: A new research program
So yeah, it would be nice if they could sort opinions from facts. Why they're at it, why don't they just recognize lies from truth too, because wouldn't that be doing the exact same thing? Then we can just run statements made by people suspected of committing a crime through the software, which can then sort out all the facts from the opinions, and we'll no longer need judges, juries or attorneys.
Roland, next time save yourself some time and just make the whole freaking thing up from scratch.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
With all due respect, that is inaccurate.
DARPA, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is a gigantic agency that funds a large proportion of academic research. The political hot button of child pornography, on the other hand, has no large funding source to offer universities. That's why so many academic projects have ties to defense.
Also, yes, usually research is, "do whatever you were going to do, but tie it to defense somehow." That's the way it goes, you need the cash. However, usually you can tie fundamental research to defense in some way. One of the PhD students who was at Cornell while I was there used movie reviews for related research... however, the simple mark "positive" or "negative" is certainly enough to help the DoD filter Internet documents if they chose to do so, so there is a tie to defense. The technology had a reason for existing without the DoD, but funding might have been another story. The same goes for cars that drive themselves, humanoid robots, and distributed computing (though distributed computing has nice corporate interests through companies like Amazon and Google that have to maintain mega-networks for their operations).
Especially since the system, whilst it will have some quite interesting applications and the research will yield interesting results, can't work. A computer cannot distinguish between a fact and a lie told as fact...garbage in, and all that.
Let me rephrase that with an example:
'I am ten years old' and 'I am twenty years old'. Which is fact, which is lie? Better yet: 'we believe Iraq has WMD' versus 'we beleive Iraq has no WMD'. No matter what algorythms or heuristics you throw at this, all a computer at most can tell you is 'sometimes when used in conjunction with this phrase, the statement is false'...but that helps you IN NO WAY, because it means the statement can also be true...the indicator means nothing...you get as many false positives as false negatives...hell, even a ratio would be meaningless in intelligence gathering.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?