Chat Relevance and Targeting (CHART)

ABSTRACT: Technology to aid in the understanding and exploitation of text has not kept pace with the technology used to generate, record, transmit, and store the data. This imbalance has led to a situation where Warfighters spend a disproportionate amount of time both finding information they need and finding the audience that needs the information they have. This problem is particularly pronounced in operational settings that rely on chat for mission coordination and situational awareness. The CHAt Relevance and Targeting (CHART) project directly addresses this problem through four technical thrusts. 1) The development of a low-overhead data monitoring appliance that can passively capture Warfighter chat activity, 2) The refinement of the text content modeling algorithms developed in Phase I, 3) Creation of a relevance-mapping capability that builds user-specific models of information salience, and 4) the development and evaluation of a user interface designed through a disciplined Goal Directed Task Analysis process. Through early Participation With Industry (PWI) activities, use of cognitive task analysis during interface development, and integration in ESC"s Delta lab, the CHART project is designed to produce a tested and validated capability by the end of Phase II. BENEFIT: In operational environments that rely on chat and other text-based communication formats for mission coordination and execution, users build and maintain Situational Awareness (SA) through reading. Since a human"s rate of reading is constant, situational awareness degrades as the text-to-time ratio increases. A rapid operational tempo decreases the time available to find ingest information, increasing the text-to-time ratio and degrading SA. A large amount of potentially relevant text also increases the text-to-time ratio, damaging SA. The CHART system improves SA by identifying the salient pieces of information from the flood of potentially relevant text presented to a user. By reducing the time spent reading irrelevant information or searching for data that may pertain to the user"s current activities, CHART reduces the text-to-time ratio, improving SA. Furthermore, by reducing the amount of time a user must spend reading to maintain an appropriate level of SA, the CHART system makes additional time available for other functions. Improved SA also allows Warfighters to construct more detailed and accurate projections of the future status of an operation or situation.