Lexical Link Analysis Application: Improving Web Service to Acquisition Visibility Portal

Abstract

DoD acquisition is an extremely complex system, comprised of myriad stakeholders, processes, people, activities, and organizational structures. Processes within this complex system are encumbered by the continuous development of large amounts of unstructured and unformatted acquisition program data, difficult to aggregate across the enterprise. Yet acquisition analysts and decision-makers must analyze all types and spectrums of the available data to obtain a complete and comprehensible picture. This can be a daunting task. We have applied a data-driven automation system and methodology, namely, lexical link analysis (LLA), to facilitate acquisition researchers and decision-makers to recognize important connections (concepts) that form patterns derived from dynamic, ongoing data collection, analysis, and decision making. LLA technology and methodology is used to uncover and display relationships among competing programs and Navy-driven requirements. In the past year, we tested our method using samples of acquisition data for visualization and validity. LLA successfully discovered statistically significant correlations, and automatically extracted lexical links, thus improving acquisition professionals knowledge of their data. This might have otherwise required expensive manpower to perform. We also developed LLA into a web service via several use cases for large-scale LLA applications. In this paper, we show how to apply the LLA web service to the Acquisition Visibility Portal, which is a critical tool to provide the DoD-wide acquisition community with authoritative and accurate data services. The resulting methodology could reduce the workload of decision-makers and achieve improved purchasing decisions, serving to improve the long-term success of acquisition strategies.