Analysis of free-form battlefield reports with shallow parsing techniques

A natural way to communicate with C2 systems would be to use natural language. There are already natural language components used in military systems, e.g. CommandTalk is a spoken-language interface to the ModSAF battlefield simulator. In our project SOKRATES we use shallow parsing techniques for written language to analyze German free-form battlefield reports. These reports are processed by transducers. The extraction result is formalized in feature structures, semantically enriched by the semantic analysis and the augmented result is then stored in the ATCCIS database. After storing in the database, triggers initiate a change in the position of a tactical symbol on the tactical map. Shallow parsing techniques are the basis for information extraction. In this paper, we therefore first introduce to the promising field of information extraction. Then, we describe in detail how shallow parsing techniques are used in our project SOKRATES.