SPYWatch, overcoming linguistic barriers in information management

Abstract

With Internet, the bulk of predictive intelligence can be obtained from public and unclassified sources, which are more accessible, ubiquitous, and valuable. Up to 80% of electronic data is textual and most valuable information is often encoded in pages which are neither structured, nor classified. The process of accessing all these raw data, heterogeneous for language used, and transforming them into information is therefore inextricably linked to the concepts of textual analysis and synthesis, hinging greatly on the ability to master the problems of multilinguality. Through Multilingual Text Mining, users can get an overview of great volumes of textual data having available a highly readable grid, which helps them discover meaningful similarities among documents and find all related information. This paper describes the approach used by SYNTHEMA, showing a content enabling system for OSINT that provides deep semantic search and information access to large quantities of distributed multimedia. SPYWatch provides with a language independent search and dynamic classification features for a broad range of data collected from several sources in a number of culturally diverse languages. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.