Robustness, Portability, and Scalability of Natural Language Systems

In the DoD, every unit, from the smallest to the largest, communicates through messages. Messages are fundamental in command and control, intelligence analysis, and in planning and replanning. Our objective is to create algorithms that will1) robustly process open source text, identifying relevant messages, and updating a data base based on the relevant messages;2) reduce the effort required in porting natural language (NL) message processing software to a new domain from months to weeks; and3) be scalable to broad domains with vocabularies of tens of thousands of words.