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Counterterrorism and Open Source Intelligence pp 355–390Cite as

Multilingual Real-time Event Extraction for Border Security Intelligence Gathering

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Social Networks ((LNSN))

Abstract

This chapter gives an overview of tools developed for Frontex, the European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union, to facilitate the process of extracting structured information on events related to border security from on-line news articles, with a particular focus on incidents and developments in the context of illegal migration, cross-border crime, and related crisis situations at the EU external borders and in third countries. A hybrid event extraction system has been constructed, which consists of two core event extraction engines, namely, NEXUS, developed at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission and PULS, developed at the University of Helsinki. These systems are applied to the stream of news articles continuously gathered and pre-processed by the Europe Media Monitor (EMM) – a large-scale multilingual news aggregation engine, developed at the JRC. In order to bridge the automated analysis phase with in-depth human analysis phase an event moderation tool has been developed, which allows the user to access the database of automatically extracted event descriptions and to clean, validate, group, enhance, and export them into other knowledge repositories.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    ‘Examining the creation of EUROSUR’, http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/-LexUriServ.do? uri=COM:2008:0068:FIN:EN:PDF.

  2. 2.

    http://press.jrc.it.

  3. 3.

    http://www.itl.nist.gov/iaui/894.02/related/projects/muc.

  4. 4.

    http://projects.ldc.upenn.edu/ace.

  5. 5.

    As of today, not all of the event subtypes in the event type hierarchy are within the scope of EUROSUR.

  6. 6.

    Really Simple Syndication: http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification.

  7. 7.

    FMM is a customised instance of EMM dedicated to monitoring media for border security-related events and topics, i.e., using specialized sources and filters.

  8. 8.

    The multilingual gazetteer mixes open resources from http://www.geonames.org and an in-house developed geo-spatial gazetteer.

  9. 9.

    {http://puls.cs.helsinki.fi

  10. 10.

    Border security related events are extracted from single articles since the appearance of such events is often singularly reported, clustered articles only report large impact events.

  11. 11.

    KML – http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/kml.

  12. 12.

    http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlanguage/.

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Acknowledgements

The major part of the work presented in this chapter was supported by the EMM Project carried out by the Open Source Text Information Mining and Analysis Action in the JRC of the EC. We are indebted to all our EMM colleagues without whom the presented work could not have been be possible.

The custmomisation of the PULSevent extraction system to the extraction of illegal migration incidents and related cross-border crimes was supported by Frontex.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, Ispra, Italy

    Martin Atkinson & Erik Van der Goot

  2. Research and Development Unit, Frontex, Warsaw, Poland

    Jakub Piskorski

  3. Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Roman Yangarber

Authors
  1. Martin Atkinson
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  2. Jakub Piskorski
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  3. Erik Van der Goot
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  4. Roman Yangarber
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jakub Piskorski .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. The Maersk McKinney Moller Institute, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230, Odense, Denmark

    Uffe Kock Wiil

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Atkinson, M., Piskorski, J., Van der Goot, E., Yangarber, R. (2011). Multilingual Real-time Event Extraction for Border Security Intelligence Gathering. In: Wiil, U.K. (eds) Counterterrorism and Open Source Intelligence. Lecture Notes in Social Networks. Springer, Vienna. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-0388-3_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-0388-3_18

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