Military Textual Analysis and Chat Research

Military use of chat, as a grassroots technology, has become so widespread in the last fifteen years that Joint communities have just begun to scratch the surface of this robust communications technology. Historically, IRC room-based chat has been the preferred paradigm for tactical users, due to its ease of use and robustness on high-jitter networks. Migration to XMPP-based chat is now being discussed for a way forward, though this change in protocol raises many questions for the current concept of operations (CONOPS), especially for edge, tactical, users. This special session will focus on current research being performed within DoD to analyze current usage of chat, in order to assist Fleet users both today and in the future.