Title: Stalker: overcoming linguistic barriers in open source intelligence

Authors: Federico Neri, Paolo Geraci, Massimo Pettoni

Addresses: Language Intelligence, Synthema S.r.l., Via Malasoma 24, 56121 Pisa, Italy. ' Language Intelligence, Synthema S.r.l., Via Malasoma 24, 56121 Pisa, Italy. ' CIFI/GE, II Information and Security Department (RIS), Italian Defence, Rome, Italy

Abstract: The revolution in information technology is making open sources more accessible, ubiquitous and valuable. The international intelligence communities have seen open sources become increasingly easier and cheaper to acquire in recent years. But up to 80% of electronic data is textual and most valuable information is often hidden and encoded in pages which are neither structured nor classified. The process of accessing all these raw data, heterogeneous in terms of source and language, and transforming them into information is therefore strongly linked to automatic textual analysis and synthesis, which are greatly related to the ability to master the problems of multilinguality. This paper describes a content-enabling system that provides deep semantic search and information access to large quantities of distributed multimedia data for both experts and the general public. Stalker provides 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.

Keywords: focused crawling; natural language processing; morpho-syntactic analysis; functional role labelling; semantic analysis; supervised clustering; unsupervised clustering; linguistic barriers; Stalker; ICT; information technology; communications technology; intelligence communities; electronic data; hidden information; encoded information; unstructured information; unclassified information; raw data; heterogeneous data; textual analysis; textual synthesis; multilinguality; content-enabling systems; deep searching; distributed multimedia; language-independent searches; dynamic classification; cultural diversity; languages; networks; virtual organisations; web based organisations; online organisations; open source intelligence; web mining; world wide web; internet.

DOI: 10.1504/IJNVO.2011.037160

International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations, 2011 Vol.8 No.1/2, pp.37 - 51

Published online: 21 Feb 2015 *

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