Recognizing Connotative Meaning in Military Chat Communications

Over the last five to seven years the use of chat in military contexts has expanded quite significantly, in some cases becoming a primary means of communicating time-sensitive data to decision makers and operators. For example, during humanitarian operations with Joint Task Force-Katrina, chat was used extensively to plan, task, and coordinate predeployment and ongoing operations. The informal nature of chat communications allows the relay of far more information than the technical content of messages. Unlike formal documents such as newspapers, chat is often emotive. "Reading between the lines" to understand the connotative meaning of communication exchanges is now feasible, and often important. Understanding the connotative meaning of text is necessary to enable more useful automatic intelligence exploitation. The research project described in this paper was directed at recognizing user connotations of uncertainty and urgency. The project built a matrix of speech features indicative of these categories of meaning, developed data mining software to recognize them, and evaluated the results.