The goal of the Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery (EELD) program is development of technologies and tools for automated discovery, extraction and linking of sparse evidence contained in large amounts of classified and unclassified data sources. EELD is developing detection capabilities to extract relevant data and relationships about people, organizations, and activities from message traffic and open source data. It will link items relating potential terrorist groups or scenarios, and learn patterns of different groups or scenarios to identify new organizations or emerging threats.
EELD\'s initial activities demonstrated the feasibility of extracting relationships from text, and validated the detectability of patterns representing terrorist groups and scenarios. EELD has also developed two promising techniques for learning patterns of activity, developed functional system concepts to guide technology developments, selected techniques to develop for evidence extraction, link discovery and pattern learning, identified scenarios to validate the detectability of patterns in unclassified and classified data, and initiated the collection and characterization of documents for technology evaluations.