Textual Analysis and Linking of Narratives (TALON)

This paper describes the design and implementation of a methodology for parsing free-text narratives in an expert decision system for law enforcement. The problem arises from local law enforcement agencies´ inability to effectively utilize criminal incident data for crime prevention. The paper proposes previously unsupported functionality in criminal incident data association expert decision systems - the automated ability of incorporating information from narrative fields from a criminal incident record management system into the analysis. A software module called TALON, the Textual Analysis and Linking of Narratives implements the methodology. Performance evaluation utilizes precision and recall metrics from information retrieval in a controlled experiment. This experiment uses the methodology on a set of documents wherein the relevance of every document is known for every possible selection of a target search document. The work presented provides a strong basis for measuring the utility of implementing alternative forms of narrative parsing for similar analyses.