Applying MOEs to web Based Activity (AMOEBA)

Effectively countering terrorist Web sites requires understanding how those Web sites attempt to influence their target audiences and how effective that influence is. This is difficult because the exact objectives and target audiences of those sites are not known and the available data is largely limited to the language of the Web sites and the responses to them. We therefore propose to exploit sociolinguistic register analysis to infer objectives and target audiences from the Web site language, and sentiments and attitudes from the responses. We note that sociolinguistic register analysis uses exactly the same statistical techniques as the fields of market segmentation analysis and sentiment analysis. BENEFIT: The ability to infer the objectives and target audiences of terrorist Web sites and to measure the effectiveness of those Web sites will provide a significant benefit to U.S. Government agencies trying to counter the influence of those Web sites. The proposed tools may also help U.S. Government agencies develop better influence operations of their own. Commercial tools based on this effort could also be used in commercial marketing and competitive analysis.