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(U) Strangers in a Strange Land?
FROM: (C)
MENA, S2E21 and
(U//FOUO) Anita H. Kulman, Human Language Technology (S23)
Run Date: 10/05/2006
(U//FOUO)... not so much: How Language Analysts are supporting
Human Language Technology research.
SERIES:
(U) HLT
(U//FOUO) Once past the cipher lock on the door, at first glance,
the office does not seem very different from offices in Analysis and
Production in the Big Four. But, looking more closely, it's not the
same. More desk space? Wider aisles? Maybe. More equipment?
Yes, there seem to be more computers. Many desks have two, and
the displays are strange: software tools not seen in operations,
funny windows with interesting graphics, scatter plots of dots and
circles, squiggles, shades of color.
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?
(U//FOUO) And the people working here? They are mostly young
men who look very smart and intense. (There are women, but their
desks happen to be in the back so you see them only once you find
your way through the cubicle maze.) No one seems to be talking
because all are focusing fixedly on their work. Behind each of
them, at arm's reach, there are white boards. In fact, there are
whiteboards everywhere, and they are covered with strange words
and with equations.
(U//FOUO) Often at the larger ones, two or three people stand with
their noses almost pressed to the board, writing equations and
discussing the work, and using language that we don't hear in S2,
but it's not a foreign language. What are they talking about?
Gaussian Mixture Models, Hidden Markhov Models, DET plots, EERs,
Segmenter, OVENCAPTIVE....
(U//FOUO) Where are we? In the basement of the Research and
Engineering Building, in R64, the Human Language
Technology Research Group spaces. And who are these
people? They are HLT researchers, mainly electrical engineers,
mathematicians, and computer scientists who are working to
develop the algorithms that will be the foundation for tools to
assist SID operational analysts process multilingual SIGINT
intercept. Here, work is done mostly on speech projects, but
close-by, in other R6 spaces, similar HLT work is being
accomplished on text and image intercept. They are researching
ways that computers can do some of the lower-level analytic tasks
so that analysts will be free to do the upper-level work.
(U//FOUO) And who are the strangers here? We are Language
Analysts from S2, who have left our desks in operations to come
here for a few hours every week or for longer details to contribute
precious language and analysis expertise to this mix of research
specialties. Here we work as Scientific or Computational Linguists
and Language Technologists.
(U//FOUO) At first, it's hard not to be intimidated by the
researchers' exceptional technical expertise, but language
expertise is desperately needed for research efforts such as
Language Identification and Speech-to-Text research, as well as on
many other projects. The researchers may be intimidated by our
exceptional technical expertise in language analysis. They are
happy to welcome us, and our work is highly appreciated.
(U//FOUO) And exactly what kind of work do we do here? It's real
language work. We listen to volumes of SIGINT intercept and label
the files according to various characteristics. This can be as
"simple" as labeling what language or dialect is being spoken-which we know is not so simple since there are some 6800 human
languages to choose from. Or it can mean transcribing the
messages very, very carefully.
(U//FOUO) The researchers give us tools which align our marks
with the voice stream of the message. In this way, we help to
create large corpora, databases of language material that the
researchers later use to train the algorithms they create to
recognize words or phrases and to write them out in the foreign
language native orthography, or to distinguish various languages
from one another.
(U//FOUO) For S2 Language Analysts who volunteer a few hours
per week or who take longer diversification tours to assist R64, the
Human Language Technology Research Group, the environment
and the language work itself are very different from what they do
in their operational assignments. The environment is more relaxed
and more intense at the same time. That is, the frenzy of direct
mission-related work is absent, but the requirement to do the
work very carefully and to be incredibly precise is exacting.
(U//FOUO) In the end, the experience that SID Language Analysts
have working in R6 is very rewarding. Their expertise is put to use
to help other language analysts, so they become real force
multipliers. They become tutors in language skills for the research
engineers who do their own jobs better once they better
understand language skills. The Language Analysts extend their
own expertise by learning how to use sophisticated tools, and even
more, they help the researchers to significantly improve those
tools. Everyone benefits.
(U//FOUO) If you think you would like this kind of experience,
email or call Anita Kulman
to check it out.
"(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