Analyzing Narrative Evolution Across Social Networks

The modern information environment (IE) is growing more complex and dynamic. Information technology advances enable adversaries to access and influence audiences globally with increasingly sophisticated tools and at an unprecedented scale. To understand the threat landscape and to respond effectively, there is a need to automatically detect, track, and differentiate the evolution of information narratives over time, and across modalities, languages, and platforms. Specifically, there is a need for developing quantitative models for tracking the evolution of information narratives and analyzing target audience engagement with narratives at scale across social platforms. To meet this need, Aptima, Inc. will perform a feasibility demonstration for IDEA, a novel AI-enabled visual analytics platform. IDEA will enable large-scale social media data collection using APIs and integration of publicly available data sources, and will enrich social media data using state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) pre-processing and entity disambiguation from in-house-developed NLP analytics. The data will be fed into three types of AI models for multilingual, multimodal proto-narrative detection, cross-platform narrative evolution, and target audience engagement analysis. Human-centric design and participatory research approaches will be used to integrate these analytics into a novel visual analytics platform to support operators and decision makers.