Automatic exploitation of multilingual information for military intelligence purposes

Intelligence plays an important role in supporting military operations. In the course of military intelligence a vast amount of textual data in different languages needs to be analyzed. In addition to information provided by traditional military intelligence, nowadays the internet offers important resources of potential militarily relevant information. However, we are not able to manually handle this vast amount of data. The science of natural language processing (NLP) provides technology to efficiently handle this task, in particular by means of machine translation and text mining. In our research project ISAF-MT we created a statistical machine translation (SMT) system for Dari to German. In this paper we describe how NLP technologies and in particular SMT can be applied to different intelligence processes. We therefore argue that multilingual NLP technology can strongly support military operations.