Helping intelligence analysts make connections

Abstract

Discovering latent connections between seemingly un-connected documents and constructing “stories ” from scattered pieces of evidence are staple tasks in intelli-gence analysis. We have worked with government in-telligence analysts to understand the strategies they use to make connections. Beyond techniques like cluster-ing that aim to provide an initial broad summary of large document collections, an important goal of an-alysts in this domain is to assimilate and synthesize fine grained information from a smaller set of foraged documents. Further, analysts ’ domain expertise is cru-cial because it provides rich contextual background for making connections and thus the goal of KDD is to augment human discovery capabilities, not supplant it. We describe a visual analytics system we have built— Analyst’s Workspace (AW)—that integrates browsing tools with a storytelling algorithm in a large screen display environment. AW helps analysts systematically construct stories of desired fidelity from document col-lections and helps marshall evidence as longer stories are constructed.