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(U) Human-Language Technology in Your Future
FROM: Anita H. Kulman
Mission Area Director, HLT PMO (S23)
Run Date: 07/20/2006
(U//FOUO) New tools for analysts to use are on the horizon...
(U) Would you like to look into the future? Some visionaries have
been able to predict things to come. Throughout the years, science
fiction writers created images of a technological world which now
actually exists. A Robert Heinlein character of the 1940's carried a
small, personal, portable telephone, and now cell phones have
become so routine that it's hard to remember a time that we did
not walk around cradling them to our ears.
(U//FOUO) But can you say what the future holds for the analysts'
work environment?
(U//FOUO) The Human Language Technology Program
Management Office (HLT PMO) and the Office of the Senior
Language Authority (SLA) can predict that more and better
technology services will be available to more analysts to help them
pinpoint the most valuable data within the text, voice or image
messages that could otherwise bury them. First, let's look at the
HLT PMO and then into the HLT crystal ball to see what the
analysts' desktop might contain tomorrow or in a year or
two, or more.
(U//FOUO) The HLT PMO is a relatively new organization that is
currently gathering strength and momentum. It was created to
focus research, development and deployment of HLT services on
one unified path toward agency mission goals. The PMO, for the
most part, funds other organizations to do the work of building and
refining and delivering HLT services, but some work is done within
its organization as well.
(U//FOUO) The PMO may see into the crystal ball, but its work is
not spectacular magic -- like the smoke and mirrors that you may
have witnessed in some technology demos, particularly by outside
companies hungry to sell their products to us, where presenters
promise miracles. These products often turn out not to work well in
our SIGINT environment. The PMO team works hard to help
analysts do their daily tasks more easily. It is searching for the
sturdy, long-lasting methods that will bring and maintain solid
technology to the entire NSA/CSS Enterprise.
(S//SI//REL) In the PMO's crystal ball today, we can see nine HLT
capabilities that will become more accurate and more useful as
well as more available:
Information Extraction:
IE technologies organize unstructured data using information from
their content and provide a way to retrieve important elements of
those data.
Language Identification:
SERIES:
(U) HLT
1. Human-Language
Technology in Your
Future
2. For Media Mining,
the Future Is Now!
3. For Media Mining,
the Future Is Now!
(conclusion)
4. 'Knowledge
Discovery': Finding
the Best Material
5. Human-Language
Technology -Everywhere
6. Dealing With a
'Tsunami' of
Intercept
7. Building HumanLanguage
Technology
8. Strangers in a
Strange Land?
LID Labels written text or voice messages by language of interest.
( Are they speaking in French or English? Is this document in
Arabic?)
Speech-to-Text:
STT provides automatic transcriptions of voice intercept in a
written form of the foreign language. ( Chinese voice into Chinese
text in characters. )
Machine Translation:
MT provides automatic translation of foreign language text into
English. ( Chinese text into English text. )
Optical Character Recognition:
OCR transforms an image of a text, in the original language, to a
text that can be edited and searched for pertinent words or
information. ( Transforming a fax of a letter into a Word document.
)
Speaker Identification:
SID locates and labels voice messages where a speaker of interest
is talking. ( Is that the terrorist we've been following? Is that
Usama bin Laden? )
Message Categorization:
This identifies the type of text or voice message, including the
identification of the topic, of the genre, etc. ( Is this a diplomatic
message or an email? ).
Information Retrieval / Question Answering:
Information Retrieval -- IR allows analysts to pull important bits
of data from databases that contain information of potential
intelligence value.
Question Answering -- Allows analysts to ask system natural
language questions and to get specific answers, not a list of articles
in which the answers may be found if you look for it. ( Where is
Islamabad? Who is Musharaf? )
(U//FOUO) Some of these capabilities are already available to
analysts, while others are still in the first stages of research and
may not reach the desktop for a few years. The HLT PMO is
working on all of them, at differing levels of resources and funding,
and with different predictions of delivery of the capabiities to
operational offices, within its five major Strategic Thrusts:
Media Mining;
Knowledge Discovery;
HLT throughout the Enterprise;
High Speed-High Volume; and
HLT for Information Sharing.
Look for articles on these Thrusts and other HLT components, how
they relate to the capabilities just mentioned, and how they will
help you.
(U//FOUO) For more information about these capabilities, please
s).
contact the HLT PMO office (" go HLT " or call
"(U//FOUO) SIDtoday articles may not be republished or reposted outside NSANet
without the consent of S0121 (DL sid_comms)."
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DERIVED FROM: NSA/CSSM 1-52, DATED 08 JAN 2007 DECLASSIFY ON: 20320108