Automated psychological categorization via linguistic processing system

Abstract

Influencing one's adversary has always been an objective in warfare. However, to date the majority of influence operations have been geared toward the masses or to very small numbers of individuals. Although marginally effective, this approach is inadequate with respect to larger numbers of high value targets and to specific subsets of the population. Limited human resources have prevented a more tailored approach, which would focus on segmentation, because individual targeting demands significant time from psychological analysts. This research examined whether or not Information Technology (IT) tools, specializing in text mining, are robust enough to automate the categorization/segmentation of individual profiles for the purpose of psychological operations (PSYOP). Research indicated that only a handful of software applications claimed to provide adequate functionality to perform these tasks. Text mining via neural networks was determined to be the best approach given the constraints of the profile data and the desired output. Five software applications were tested and evaluated for their ability to reproduce the results of a social psychologist. Through statistical analysis, it was concluded that the tested applications are not currently mature enough to produce accurate results that would enable automated segmentation of individual profiles based on supervised linguistic processing.