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Natural Language Processing for State Security

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the your-ipod-can-tell-what-you-mean dept.

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."

5 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Sigh. by Renraku · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
    1. Re:Sigh. by BiggerIsBetter · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'd rather have a computer flagging me than a human who may judge me by the color of my skin

      If they can flag based on what you said, I'm sure they can flag you based on the skin tone in the photo on your drivers license or passport too. Or by your just family history or name. Or where you live. Or where your parents live.

      Anyways, odds are the computer won't be doing the flagging per se, it'll just be following the parameters and policies entered by those humans controlling it. I'm not sure they'd trust "national security" to a self-learning neural net without some sort of bias in it.

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      Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
  2. Number 891224 by bky1701 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Number 891224 has expressed a dislike of Emperor Bush, incident reported to FBI and Homeland Security.

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    Great Intellect...
  3. A really difficult problem by MarkWatson · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. Can do or will do? by Dan+East · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What comptuers are very good at, though, is scanning through text to deduct human opinions from factual information.

    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 ... 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.

    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

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    Better known as 318230.