Modus Operandi Awarded U.S. Army Contract to Create Vocabulary Mining System To Improve Intelligence Analysis

Modus Operandi, a leading software and information integration technology company, has been awarded a contract by the U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Command (CECOM) to develop a system that identifies critical words and phrases for intelligence analysis, and maintains lists of these key words. The Vocabulary – Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (V-ISR) project, will address the challenges associated with processing overwhelming amounts of intelligence data.

The V-ISR project will use advanced, machine-learning techniques to recognize new terms and automatically categorize them within lists that will be constantly updated. Until now, intelligence analysts have had to manually identify new terms and add them to ‘key word’ lists, a process that is very time-consuming and error prone. This new technology will automate that process, allowing analysts to focus on the job at hand, which is providing commanders and warfighters with prioritized and actionable intelligence to make sound and timely decisions.

“Much like the news alerts many business people and consumers use to watch for updates on topics on the Internet, it is important to have the right key words,” said Richard Hull, executive vice president and chief scientist, Modus Operandi. “The vocabulary of war is dynamic and changes with the tactics of the enemy. With this technology, we can help the analyst identify new relevant terms and phrases that describe emerging tactics and patterns in enemy behavior, thereby improving the utility of text analytics and information extraction systems.”

The two-year, Phase II contract is sponsored by the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command (RDECOM) Communications Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center (CERDEC) at Fort Monmouth, N.J. through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program.