Research

The police and other authorities are challenged by the new forms of communication in the Web 2.0, which are increasingly used for preparing, organizing, or committing crimes such as:

• Sexual harassment of children
• Distribution of illegal and dangerous materials
• Planning of unauthorized demos, terror acts, etc.
• Announcement of rampages and suicides
• Weapon, drug, or human trafficking 

To make information on the Web manageable for manual inspection, we aim to research methods for processing natural language documents.

• Create tools which aid in investigating crimes on the Web
• Find relevant documents using a semantic search
• Identify relevant information bits (persons, places, times)
• Analyze the relations between them

The research of methods for analyzing material on the Web can be split up into three steps:
1. Data Acquisition: Crawling or creation of development data using the Web

• Definition of relevant scenarios and data sources with support from the authorities
• ISPs, social network providers etc. will assist in providing interfaces, metadata etc.
• Cleaning and preprocessing, e.g. treatment of typos, slang... 

2. Data Analysis: Development/application of state of the art Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. Example Use: identification of key persons in an extremist forum, analysis of their relationships and the content of their posts.

• Semantically enriched document retrieval
• Keyphrase Extraction
• Topic Clustering
• Named Entity Recognition / Disambiguation
• Relationship Extraction
• Automatic Summarization

3. Presentation of Results: Development of user interfaces for:

• Visualizing and highlighting relevant results
• Interactive exploration of the result space
• Assistance for transferring results into evidence usable in court

•  CCICADA (Command, Control and Interoperability Center for Advanced Data Analysis)
       Research Director:  Prof. Dr. Eduard Hovy
      Various high-profile projects in this area
       United States Department of Homeland Security
•  FIVES/ INBEKI
      EU-Projects for fighting child pornography
      Coordinator:  Dr. Armin Stahl, DFKI

• Prof. Dr. Iryna Gurevych, Principal Investigator
• Emily Jamison, Doctoral Researcher

Former staff:

• Michael Matuschek, TU Darmstadt