Intelligence analysts grapple with many challenges, chief among them is the need for software support in storytelling, i.e., automatically ‘connecting the dots’ between disparate entities (e.g., people, organizations) in an effort to form hypotheses and suggest nonobvious relationships. We present a system to automatically construct stories in entity networks that can help form directed chains of relationships, with support for co-referencing, evidence marshaling, and imposing syntactic constraints on the story generation process. A novel optimization technique based on concept lattice mining enables us to rapidly construct stories on massive datasets. Using several public domain datasets, we illustrate how our approach overcomes many limitations of current systems and enables the analyst to efficiently narrow down to hypotheses of interest and reason about alternative explanations. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.2.8 [Database management]: Database applications—Data minin...
M. Shahriar Hossain, Patrick Butler, Arnold P. Boe