Linguistic Analysis and Semantic Representation
Understanding language, whether it is written, spoken or implied by action, is an essential capability in many analytical systems. Central to understanding language in humans and machines are the areas of computational linguistics and formal semantic representation. Our work in computational linguistics is focused on building and integrating linguistic analysis components, such as named entity recognition, affect analysis, event recognition, into analytical systems to aid in situational awareness. In addition to relying on existing software, we have significant research programs in frame analysis, sentiment detection, temporal reasoning and participant profiling.
In addition to identifying linguistic patterns and concepts, it is often necessarily to have formal representations of language data for complex reasoning tasks. Concepts like "semantic computing" and "semantic search" refer to computational techniques that use knowledge representation and deep linkage into the referents of information tokens in language (e.g., dictionaries, thesauri and ontologies) and in data resources (e.g., libraries, databases and web-based repositories). Perhaps the best-known sense is in the "semantic web", as described by Berners-Lee, et al. (2001). Our work in this area ranges from infusion of taxonomy-based user interfaces, which help to guide the user through navigational tasks, to full-blown, ontology-based reasoning systems and the foundations of ontology technology. We envision that semantic technologies could be applied in fields as diverse as intelligence analysis, data visualization, engineering simulation and modeling, and navigating environmental information.
By most accounts, semantic technologies have the potential to revolutionize the way that humans interact with information in much the same way that the World Wide Web has done. Consequently, in addition to developing applications and architectures that use these emerging semantic technologies, staff also study the impact that these technologies are likely to have on how science is conducted, how our nation's security is protected and how we deal with environmental and energy issues in the future.
For more information, contact Michelle Gregory at (509) 375-2824.
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