CASHNET: Conceptual and Social Human Networks Evolving in Time

The focus of the military has shifted to much more complex missions, stressing counter-insurgency (COIN), and Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction (SSTR) operations, and Humanitarian Aid/Disaster Relief (HADR). The accompanying intelligence apparatus must therefore be able to answer fundamental questions about the people we are trying to protect and persuade which requires knowledge about these environments and relationships, which may be buried in a vast amount of textual information. Building on Aptima"s existing language processing capabilities, a new tool, CASHNET (Conceptual and Social Human Networks Evolving in Time) will extract novel relationships between entities and concepts from text data. Rather than simply relying on standard entity extraction technology that captures only well-defined relationships between people, CASHNET will examine conceptual links to identify entities that may have similar preferences, attitudes, or needs, as well as relationships between people, concepts, and locations. This will allow for a broader construction of conceptual and social networks that can uncover linkages that would be missed by technologies that assume physical or structured interactions between entities. CASHNET will also display these relationships visually and be able to forecast how they might evolve over time.