Applications of text analytics in the intelligence community

Abstract

We evaluate Anseri, a commercial text analytics software, and its ability to assist a military intelligence analyst in the planning phase of major operations. The intelligence cycle involves extensive, timely, and detailed analysis of the operating environment. This requires a lot of reading by intelligence analysts to fully analyze the content. Tools that automate the initial summarization of the topic themes in a large body of text reduce the amount of time spent reading the material and focus the analyst's research efforts by providing a method to prioritize documents based on their relevance to the research topic. Anseri's utility is tested on a corpus of Islamic State press releases to demonstrate the analyst's ability to quickly gain a basic understanding of the thematic nature of the corpus and prioritize deeper research.