Slashdot Log In
Natural Language Processing for State Security
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Sep 24, 2006 08:39 PM
from the your-ipod-can-tell-what-you-mean dept.
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."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading ... Please wait.

tinfoil hat... or is it? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Ooooh another funding scramble! (Score:2)
Of course universities will be scrambling to help. Big dollars, imprecise goals..... and many of the professors would have done research in related fields.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me rephrase
Moo (Score:5, Funny)
.... is spell-checking.....
....something, apparently, the editors are not good at....
Re:Moo (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, computers are great at spell checking (Score:3, Funny)
I have a spelling checker,
It came with my PC.
It plane lee marks four my revue
Mis
Sigh. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sigh. (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
State security, my ass! (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re: (Score:2)
Alias-i's ThreatTracker (Score:5, Interesting)
No, I don't work for them, but their LingPipe toolkit has some cooooool stuff.
I missed the joke (Score:2)
really? (Score:2, Insightful)
I would say that comptuers (sic) aren't very good at deducting human opinions yet. They _may
One of the coolest/scariest things about the net.. (Score:2)
A really difficult problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Possible? Yes, given very narrow domains of discourse and lots of work.
All problems are difficult till solved (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Can we have a competition for inane comments?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A really difficult problem (Score:4, Interesting)
When used successfully over said "narrow domains", the human tendency (especially that set of humanity which makes the high-level choices for groups and organizations) will be to expand the domain in hopes of applying it to ever greater numbers of items.
Of course, as the search domain is expanded, the effectiveness of the results decline, with no warning to the clueless idiots driving the search. False positives eventually exceed true positives by greater and greater margins.
In the end, the strategy collapses, as a great many victims are shown to be wrongly targeted -- but until that point, the system does a LOT more harm than good.
Thank Goodness our leaders are such wise and contemplative souls that they would never, ever misuse such a tool.
A boon to research (Score:5, Interesting)
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"
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 sour
Re: (Score:2)
Two Roland junk submissions in two days (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Man... (Score:2, Insightful)
well (Score:2)
Sounds like GALE (Score:5, Interesting)
" 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."
Actually, it sounds more like ACE (Score:2)
GALE seems geared towards translation and aggregation of data for convenient
access by mono-lingual military and intelligence personnel. The goal of the
ACE project is to provide classification of data based on what it actu
Re: (Score:2)
Executive Summary
Classication: Classified.
CRUSH! KILL! DESTROY!
End of report
abuse? (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Aha! (Score:3, Funny)
Welcome the new opinion-based CAPTCHA-s!
Re: (Score:2)
-- Fox News
NLP (Score:2)
This could be a doub
Can do or will do? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
one thing (Score:2, Funny)
screw national security (Score:3, Interesting)
Too Smart (Score:2)
If one of these NLP "expert" systems can extract fact or opinion from that sentence, we should delete
Start writing long run-on sentences with big words (Score:2)
Who Thinks this is Reasonable? (Score:2)
The 4th amendment says:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, hous
Bushed (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Whatever the orignal intention, users have noticed that if enough of them use a particular tag,
Re: (Score:2)
Really? How is it informative when the same, single article has the following associated tags: "Yes", "N
Re: (Score:2)
I hope you haven't been relying on those "Yes" or "No" tags to tell you if a story is right or wrong. The point of the tag system is t
Re: (Score:2)
> Good point - if it has all of them at once, it's probably a waste of time. Although it could be a good indicator of whet
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That's the basis of our overreliance on technology in intelligence gathering