Message Handler 
Dr. Steven Flank 
Advanced Research Projects Agency 
3701 N. Fairfax Drive, Arlington, VA 22203 
Email: sflank@arpa.mil 
Phone: (703) 696-2309 
The Message Handler extracts critical intelligence 
information from the free-text of military messages 
to merge with the data'parsed from fixed-fields. In 
the third of four project phases, the current fo- 
cus is on developing stand-alone capabilities demon- 
strating the viability of natural language process- 
ing in Advance Concept Technology Demonstrations 
(ACTDs), and to operational users at military com- 
mands. E-Systems' engineers address the overall 
military message traffic processing problem, while 
SRI Interation~l's computational linguists adapt 
their Finite State Automaton Text Understanding 
System (FASTUS) technology to the domain of mil- 
itary message free-text. 
In previous phases, the Message Handler pro- 
cessed over 180 types of messages while establish- 
ing the feasiblity of trainlng the FASTUS technol- 
ogy to process the free-text of military messages. 
The previous efforts demonstrated that combining 
the FASTUS syntactical approach to processing free- 
text using finite-state automata with conventional 
parsing of fixed fields can yield results approximat- 
ing human performance working under similar op- 
erational conditions. At the end of Phase II of the 
project, the Message Handler was able to process 
4000 military messages per day. The automatically 
scored and manually validated results for messages 
without tables were 75% recall, 31% overgeneration, 
and 64% precision. The goals of the Message Han- 
dler project is to process 10,000 military messages 
per day at a performance level of 80information ex- 
tracted from the messages includes facilities, units, 
equipment, locations, times, coordinates, unit asso- 
ciations, events, event relationships, and parametric 
measures. 
The message handling problem involves nuisances 
such as the structure and organization of both the 
overall message and the free-text. Another signif- 
icant message handling issue is the processing of 
unique ad-hoc tables which commonly appear within 
the free-text portion of messages. The Message Han- 
dler development reflects the evaluation of thou- 
sands of real world messages from the military the- 
aters. 
The voluminous and constantly changing flow of 
military messages necessitates an on-going review of 
the message corpus received by military commands 
to support the Message Handler development. In 
analyzing how the Message Handler functions match 
intelligence production environments, the system en- 
gineers established that the Message Handler should 
produce multiple interpretations of messages which 
precludes the denial of vital information to down- 
stream systems that would correlate and fuse Mes- 
sage Handler outputs with data from other sources. 
The Message Handler effort includes initiatives for 
making natural language processing a viable tool 
for the military user. Previous phases focused on 
developing extraction technology allowing minimal 
human intervention. The current phase assesses the 
appropriate level of human intervention and the ap- 
propriate interface tools. There is an on-going re- 
assessment of what military-related language main- 
tenance is amenable to execution by military users, 
and what maintenance must be reserved for linguis- 
tic specialists. The user tools will permit easy mod- 
ification for lexicon or gazetteer and as much capa- 
bility as possible for modifying domain-based gram- 
mars. 
The Message Handler program has a collaborative 
engineering initiative between developer and poten- 
tial users employing Internet and Intellink capabil- 
ities in the design and maintenance of the Message 
Handler. 
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