Evaluation of Intelligent Information Retrieval Tools for Unstructured Police Case Reports

The Belgian Federal Police (BFP) already using an array of advanced and task-specific tools for collection, dispersal and exploitation of highly structured information, is now shifting attention towards intelligent information retrieval technologies for exploiting vast amounts of unstructured information sources (police case reports), from which further knowledge could be obtained for analysis purposes. The INFO-NS research project, is aimed to provide an objective study of the applicability of mining and decision support tools for the BFP. More specifically, it is studied whether information retrieval, extraction and classification tools might leverage intelligence and decision support while exploiting the information that is contained in vast amounts of free text material and linking it with any coexisting, structured data sets that are currently in use. This article provides an insight into the requirements of the BFP and police in general with regard to a like decision support system, gives an overview of our evaluation approach and presents one aspect of evaluation criteria aimed at testing the functional conformity of such tools against a set of functional requirements.