The New York Times - Oct 4, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/04/us/04monitor.html?ref=us
Software Being Developed to Monitor Opinions of U.S.
By ERIC LIPTON
WASHINGTON, Oct. 3--A consortium of major universities, using Homeland
Security Department money, is developing software that would let the
government monitor negative opinions of the United States or its
leaders in newspapers and other publications overseas.
Such a "sentiment analysis" is intended to identify potential threats
to the nation, security officials said.
Researchers at institutions including Cornell, the University of
Pittsburgh and the University of Utah intend to test the system on
hundreds of articles published in 2001 and 2002 on topics like
President Bush's use of the term "axis of evil," the handling of
detainees at Guantanamo Bay, the debate over global warming and the
coup attempt against President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.
A $2.4 million grant will finance the research over three years.
American officials have long relied on newspapers and other news
sources to track events and opinions here and abroad, a goal that has
included the routine translation of articles from many foreign
publications and news services.
The new software would allow much more rapid and comprehensive
monitoring of the global news media, as the Homeland Security
Department and, perhaps, intelligence agencies look "to identify common
patterns from numerous sources of information which might be indicative
of potential threats to the nation," a statement by the department said.
It could take several years for such a monitoring system to be in
place, said Joe Kielman, coordinator of the research effort. The
monitoring would not extend to United States news, Mr. Kielman said.
"We want to understand the rhetoric that is being published and how
intense it is, such as the difference between dislike and excoriate,"
he said.
Even the basic research has raised concern among journalism advocates
and privacy groups, as well as representatives of the foreign news media.
"It is just creepy and Orwellian," said Lucy Dalglish, a lawyer and
former editor who is executive director of the Reporters Committee for
Freedom of the Press.
Andrei Sitov, Washington bureau chief of the Itar-Tass news agency of
Russia, said he hoped that the objective did not go beyond simply
identifying threats to efforts to stifle criticism about an American
president or administration.
"This is what makes your country great, the open society where people
can criticize their own government," Mr. Sitov said.
The researchers, using an grant provided by a research group once
affiliated with the Central Intelligence Agency, have complied a
database of hundreds of articles that it is being used to train a
computer to recognize, rank and interpret statements.
The software would need to be able to distinguish between statements
like "this spaghetti is good" and "this spaghetti is not very good --
it's excellent," said Claire T. Cardie, a professor of computer science
at Cornell.
Professor Cardie ranked the second statement as a more intense positive
opinion than the first.
The articles in the database include work from many American newspapers
and news wire services, including The Miami Herald and The New York
Times, as well as foreign sources like Agence France-Presse and The
Dawn, a newspaper in Pakistan.
One article discusses how a rabid fox bit a grazing cow in Romania,
hardly a threat to the United States. Another item, an editorial in
response to Mr. Bush's use in 2002 of "axis of evil" to describe Iraq,
Iran and North Korea, said: "The U.S. is the first nation to have
developed nuclear weapons. Moreover, the U.S. is the first and only
nation ever to deploy such weapons."
The approach, called natural language processing, has been under
development for decades. It is widely used to summarize basic facts in
a text or to create abridged versions of articles.
But interpreting and rating expressions of opinion, without making too
many errors, has been much more challenging, said Professor Cardie and
Janyce M. Wiebe, an associate professor of computer science at the
University of Pittsburgh. Their system would include a confidence
rating for each "opinion" that it evaluates and would allow an official
to refer quickly to the actual text that the computer indicates
contains an intense anti-American statement.
Ultimately, the government could in a semiautomated way track a
statement by specific individuals abroad or track reports by particular
foreign news outlets or journalists, rating comments about American
policies or officials.
Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy
Information Center in Washington, said the effort recalled the aborted
2002 push by a Defense Department agency to develop a tracking system
called Total Information Awareness that was intended to detect
terrorists by analyzing troves of information.
"That is really chilling," Mr. Rotenberg said. "And it seems far afield
from the mission of homeland security."
Federal law prohibits the Homeland Security Department or other
intelligence agencies from building such a database on American
citizens, and no effort would be made to do that, a spokesman for the
department, Christopher Kelly, said. But there would be no such
restrictions on using foreign news media, Mr. Kelly said.
Mr. Kielman, the project coordinator, said questions on using the
software were premature because the department was just now financing
the basic research necessary to set up an operating system.
Professors Cardie and Wiebe said they understood that there were
legitimate questions about the ultimate use of their software.
"There has to be guidelines and restrictions on the use of this kind of
technology by the government," Professor Wiebe said. "But it doesn't
mean it is not useful. It can just as easily help the government
understand what is going on in places around the world."
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