Using Sequence Package Analysis as a New Natural Language Understanding Method for Mining Government Recordings of Terror Suspects

Three years after 9/11, the Justice Department made the astounding revelation that more than 120,000 hours of potentially valuable terrorismrelated recordings had yet to be transcribed. Clearly, the government’s efforts to obtain such recordings have continued. Yet there is no evidence that the contents of the recorded calls have been analyzed any more efficiently. Perhaps analysis by conventional means would be of limited value in any event. After all, terror suspects tend to avoid words that might alarm intelligence agents, thus “outsmarting” conventional mining programs, which heavily rely on wordspotting techniques. One solution is the application of a new natural language understanding method, known as Sequence Package Analysis, which can transcend the limitations of basic parsing methods by mapping out the generic conversational sequence patterns found in the dialog. The purpose of this paper is show how this new method can efficiently mine a large volume of government recordings of the conversations of terror suspects – with the goal of reducing the backlog of unanalyzed calls.