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<Paper uid="W06-3410">
  <Title>RETROSPECTIVE ANALYSIS OF COMUNICATION EVENTS - Understanding the Dynamics of Collaborative Multi-Party Discourse.</Title>
  <Section position="6" start_page="66" end_page="67" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
4 Sumary &amp; Further Work
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The ultimate goal of the RACE project is to assist analysts as they try to extract meaning from a myriad of sources. To this end, we started by talking with analysts themselves. This is in recognition of the fact that no matter how powerful a tol might seem to its developers, it is useless un- null htp:/ww.nerc.com/~filez/blackout.html less the end users actually adopt it. By working with analysts every step of the way, we are keeping that goal in sight.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> RACE's design as a test bed enables other research to get in front of the analyst soner. The quick insertion of the text affect work ilustrates the capability to make functionality available to the user for evaluation. Showing an analyst a concrete example of an idea allows them to get a better understanding of it and an easier way to elicit feed-back for future work.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> While this is an exciting first step, there are many avenues of crucial research stil to be performed. In many fields, having access to all the communications events that occurred is rare. Research needs to be performed to determine how best to enable the analyst to fil in these blanks. Potential approaches include hypothesized inference or the use placeholders.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Currently, the prototype analytical environment only processes and displays textual transcripts of communication events. This decision was made to handle textual content first so to ensure proof of principle prior to expending effort on the more challenging aspect of fusing video, audio, stil images and text (VAST). Some effort has been expended on loking for suitable design metaphors that could aid an analyst in making sense of such diverse media (e.g., video production user interfaces such as Final Cut Pro) but more research, design and evaluation is required.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> More effort needs to be expended on understanding how best to fuse different modalities of communication. Currently, a time-shifting approach is used to normalize an asynchronous email thread with similar-topic synchronous communications (e.g., telephone call, instant messaging session). This aproach works but needs to be refined in order to be successful. At one level, the modality used is irrelevant - it is the esence of the event that is of primary concern. Being able to boil down the associated threads into one specific stream (e.g., multiple conversations acros a number of modalities, all around the topic of ploting to explode a device at a particular location) is crucial in being able to suport the analytical tradecraft and allow analysts to provide actionable intelligence to their superiors.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Conversations rarely keep to one single focused topic, and this can cause problems in the cluster visualization type approach used so far.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6">  Topic segmentation is a difficult research area and not one that we intend to pursue. There are at least three projects currently on the way at our institution that deal with this area and this work intends to utilize the fruits of those labors.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> Finally, there are many elements of multi-party discourse that exist outside linguistic boundaries. The words we use, how often we make an uterance, etc., all speak to who we are as individuals. While some of this is obvious and can be observed with just a cursory review of a transcript of the source material, other elements are discrete and hiden. For example, conversational statistics can be recorded and used to determine an individual's level of engagement in a topic. Detection of familiarity (e.g., either by specific words not currently found in the present conversation or through the use of casual rather than formal speech) can indicate personal relationships between individuals in a dyad. Personality types can be inferred by markers indicative of leadership (e.g., number of interruptions performed/received, ability to change topic, use of power terms) or weaker, subversive roles (e.g., use of weak terms, submision of flor, deference to others). Analysts are rarely able to access such rich personality profiles of their subjects without performing an exhaustive analysis or calling in specialized help. While we are just begining to integrate certain elements of social discourse, there are many other dimensions to be considered.</Paragraph>
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