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, composed of myriad stakeholders, processes, people, activities, and organizational structures. Processes within this complex system are encumbered by continuous creation of large amounts of unstructured and unformatted acquisition program data. Acquisition analysts and decision-makers must analyze this available data to obtain a complete and understandable picture. For those embedded within the complexities of the acquisition community, this effort represents a daunting, if not impossible, task. We apply a data-driven automation system, namely, Lexical Link Analysis (LLA), to help acquisition researchers and decision-makers recognize important connections (concepts) that form patterns derived from dynamic, ongoing data collection. This year we have built two use cases of the LLA web service to develop focused practice and theory. In practice, we have been examining both LLA and System Self-awareness (SSA) as knowledge management tools for scoring/ranking interesting information and for visualizing/reporting correlations among categories of information. In theory, we have shown how to optimize the overall fitness of the system by considering the trade-off between an authority and expertise. This work has advanced the DoD-wide effort of integrating and maintaining authoritative and accurate acquisition data services in both legacy and new platforms.