Applications of Lexical Link Analysis Web Service for Large-Scale Automation, Validation, Discovery, Visualization, and Real-Time Program Awareness

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, which is narrowly useful, but 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 understandable picture. This is a kind of systems non-congruence that has been difficult to overcome. For those embedded within the complexities of the acquisition community, this can be a daunting, if not impossible, task. We will apply a data-driven automation system, 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. The 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. This otherwise might have required expensive and sometimes scarce manpower to perform (e.g., asking many contractors, continually looking through documentation, and adding excerpts to categories of interest in various spreadsheets). We also developed LLA into a web service this year and have developed use cases for large-scale LLA applications. We report one use case and the status of the web service in this paper.