If only John had mentioned to Aaron that the custard had apples, not the cake. John's kind of a jerk like that.
“Much of the operationally-relevant information relied on in support of DoD missions may be implicit rather than explicitly expressed, and in many cases, information is deliberately obfuscated and important activities and objects are only indirectly referenced.”
In short, sometimes the meaning in messages just isn’t clear. Ironic, isn’t it?
That can be a problem, though, especially on the ground where accurate and timely intelligence can affect the success or failure of a mission.
Through various and sundry means, DoD collects vast sets of data in the form of messages, documents, notes and the like, both on and off the battlefield. Thoroughly and efficiently processing this data to extract valuable content is a challenge based on volume alone, but the problem is magnified when important information within those files is deliberately masked by its authors.
So, what is there to do when you have commanders and warfighters on the front line depending on analysts to help them build informed plans?
Why, you use technology, of course.
DARPA is developing a new type of automated, deep natural-language understanding technology which they say may hold a solution for more efficiently processing text information. A mumbo-jumbo decomplicator?
Go on…
When processed at its most basic level without ingrained cultural filters, language offers the key to understanding connections in text that might not be readily apparent to humans. A “just the facts” approach is more effective than the “the give us the whole story” angle, so to speak. Also, it’s fun to talk like a 1940s detective.
But how do you do that? Not the detective talk, sweetheart, I mean the dialing-it-down. Getting to the root of the story. The meat and potatoes of the whole shebang (okay, I’ll stop).
In short, DEFT. At length…it makes more sense.
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