Homeland security gives Pitt 'decoding' deal
The University of Pittsburgh will develop software aimed at "decoding" text, with funding from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
"The goals of the work will be to identify facts and entities, as well as beliefs and motivations, expressed in text, and to create new methods for linking events and beliefs across documents, and tracking them over time," said Pitt computer science professor and lead researcher Janyce Wiebe.
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The work will focus on identifying common patterns from numerous sources of information, some of which may be indicative of potential security threats.
The grant is for three years and is valued at $2.4 million, the school said. Pitt will work in tandem with Cornell and the University of Utah.
Other schools chosen by the Department of Homeland Security to conduct research on a text decoder are Rutgers University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Southern California.
The "disambiguation" of sentences, words and phrases is the focus of the program, Wiebe said.
"The field of natural language processing breaks things into sentences to identify the words, and the 'parser' determines the sentence structure to determine each meaning," she said.
Wiebe stressed that any decoder will not be used on e-mail and isn't intended to pry into personal lives.
"Privacy is a key part of the program," she said. "We will use newspaper articles and other freely available text."
The schools will collaborate with the Institute for Discrete Sciences, a joint project between DHS and several National Laboratories, led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The discrete sciences apply the methods of discrete, or finite, mathematics to computer science.
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