Alias-i ThreatTrackers™
    Breck Baldwin  
Alias-i inc. 
10 E 39
th
 Street 
Suite 1124 
New York, NY 10016  
breck@alias-i.com 
Bob Carpenter 
Alias-i inc. 
10 E 39
th
 Street 
Suite 1124 
New York, NY 10016  
carp@alias-i.com 
Aaron Ross 
Alias-i inc. 
10 E 39
th
 Street 
Suite 1124 
New York, NY 10016  
ross@alias-i.com 
 
 
ABSTRACT 
 
Alias-i ThreatTrackers are an advanced information access 
application designed around the needs of analysts working through 
a large daily data feed. ThreatTrackers help analysts decompose an 
information gathering topic like the unfolding political situation in 
Iraq into specifications including people, places, organizations and 
relationships. These specifications are then used to collect and 
browse information on a daily basis. The nearest related 
technologies are information retrieval (search engines), document 
categorization, information extraction and named entity 
detection.ThreatTrackers are currently being used in the Total 
Information Awareness program. 
Keywords 
Search, coreference, anaphora, information access. 
1. Description of Demo 
Alias-i ThreatTrackers are an advanced information access 
application designed around the needs of analysts working 
through a large daily data feed. ThreatTrackers help analysts 
decompose an information gathering topic like the unfolding 
political situation in Iraq into specifications including 
people, places, organizations and relationships. These 
specifications are then used to collect and browse 
information on a daily basis. The nearest related 
technologies are information retrieval (search engines), 
document categorization, information extraction and named 
entity detection.ThreatTrackers are currently being used in 
the Total Information Awareness program. 
ThreatTrackers have two major components, first is a 
mentally natural organization of a data feed we call 
Cognitive Indexing(tm), and second, a user interface which 
combines data triage, browsing and ThreatTracker 
authoring. 
2. Cognitive Indexing™ 
Cognitive Indexing organizes text data feeds into mentally 
natural units like people, events, things, organizations and 
relationships. For example, the Cognitive Indexing 
representation for an Entity like Osama bin Laden contains 
pointers to all sentences in the data feed that mention him 
Fig 4, including spelling variation (i.e. Usama) and 
pronouns which refer to him. In future versions of the 
system, the Cognitive Indexing representation of Osama will 
include audio mentions of him as well as database entries for 
him. In addition to coreference, Cognitive Indexing supports 
standard key word lookup, relationship detection between 
entities and analyst authored classes of Entities. 
3. ThreatTracker Interface  
 
The ThreatTracker interface provides complete analyst control over 
what is in a ThreatTracker, and provides multiple views into the 
collected data. Included are sentence excerpt summaries, tables of 
relationships between Entities and easy access to original source 
documents. There is also a redundant information filter on 
documents or sentences. ThreatTrackers allow analysts to create 
new categories of Entities like “Chemical Weapons Precursors “ 
for use inside ThreatTrackers. Once created, ThreatTrackers serve 
as a form of information triage against the data feed. 
4. Acknowledgements  
 
We would like to acknowledge the assistance of Mitre Corp. in 
providing the data feed for the product as well as many analysts 
who lent input to the design. This research has been funded under 
the TIDES program. 
 
 
Fig. 1 ThreatTracker Top Level Interface 
                                                               Edmonton, May-June 2003
                                                              Demonstrations , pp. 3-4
                                                         Proceedings of HLT-NAACL 2003
 
Fig.2 View of Individual ThreatTracker on Terrorist Suspects 
Fig. 3 Association Table view of Entities in the same sentence as Osama bin Laden. 
 
Fig. 4  Excerpt Summary for Osama Bin Laden 
