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."

Comments

tinfoil hat... or is it?

[macadamia_harold]

What comptuers 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.

Yeah, because we need AT&T giving wide-scale, undocumented wiretaps to the NSA, who use voice recognition to generate transcripts of everyone's phone calls, and then DHS can run NLP on those transcripts to compile a list of "persons of interest", who are then automatically added to the TSA no-fly lists.

Yeah, I can envision the future, and the future sucks.

Moo

[Chacham]

What comptuers are very good at, though,

.... is spell-checking.....

....something, apparently, the editors are not good at....

Sigh.

[Renraku]

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.

Re:Sigh.

[BiggerIsBetter]

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.

Number 891224

[bky1701]

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

Alias-i's ThreatTracker

[otisg]

There is a great little company in Brooklyn, NY called Alias-i. Some years ago they built this interesting "tool" called....guess....ThreatTracker. Information Extraction, Named Entity Recognition and other interesting stuff, if you are into this.
No, I don't work for them, but their LingPipe toolkit has some cooooool stuff.

A really difficult problem

[MarkWatson]

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.

A boon to research

[JanneM]

It's clear "national security" has become what "the internet" or "the cold war" were in their prime: an all-purpose catchphrase to get funding for any research whatsoever, no matter how tenuously connected.

Look at the two project proposals below and imagine which one will have an easier time getting funding:

"An epistemological metaanalysis of object-subject interrelations and conflict avoidance in Beowulf"

or

"An epistemological metaanalysis of object-subject interrelations and conflict avoidance in Beowulf to better understand threats to NATIONAL SECURITY"

Sounds like GALE

[Dr. Eggman]

Sounds kind of like DARPA's Information Processing Technology Office's GALE Program:

" The goal of the GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) program is to develop and apply computer software technologies to absorb, analyze and interpret huge volumes of speech and text in multiple languages, eliminating the need for linguists and analysts and automatically providing relevant, distilled actionable information to military command and personnel in a timely fashion. Automatic processing "engines" will convert and distill the data, delivering pertinent, consolidated information in easy-to-understand forms to military personnel and monolingual English-speaking analysts in response to direct or implicit requests."

Can do or will do?

[Dan East]

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