The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is looking into the potential of natural language processing to speed up the analysis of imagery and maps by reducing the time spent on text reading and generation.
NGA said Friday it hopes to raise awareness across the intelligence community about the potential time savings and intelligence benefits of using NLP to automate the sifting, sorting, translation and comprehension of vast amounts of data.
The agency conducted a year-long study of NLP and found that up to 80 percent of its workforce’s average workflow is spent on conducting research, reviewing documents, generating reports and tipping imagery.
“Many NGA employees know that NLP resources are available, but they have difficulty knowing where to find them or how to orient them towards NGA topics of interest,” said Monica Lipscomb NLP program manager at NGA Research.
Lipscomb said NLP can work to support workflows involving finance, security, policy, records management and safety of navigation alerts.
NLP is the driving force behind the Source Maritime Automated Processing System, which has reportedly streamlined the process of generating navigation warning alerts since its launch in April.
