US Intelligence Agency to Compile Mountain of Metaphors

coondoggie writes "Researchers with the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity want to build a repository of metaphors. You read that right. Not just American/English metaphors mind you but those of Iranian Farsi, Mexican Spanish and Russian speakers. Why metaphors? 'Metaphors have been known since Aristotle as poetic or rhetorical devices that are unique, creative instances of language artistry (for example: The world is a stage; Time is money). Over the last 30 years, metaphors have been shown to be pervasive in everyday language and to reveal how people in a culture define and understand the world around them,' IARPA says."

IARPA speaks with forked tongue

[RandCraw]

The OA quotes IARPA (DARPA for intelligence gathering):

"For decision makers to be effective in a world of mass communication and global interaction, they must understand the shared concepts and worldviews of members of other cultures of interest."

Horse hockey.

No computer can help a human understand a simile, much less an abstraction that's often in the guise of a complex historical or literary reference (i.e. metaphor). So what is the *real* purpose for this 5 year spy program?

First, metaphors are a great identifier of individual writing styles. The trick though is to recognize *when* a word is being used as a metaphor. Tagging a word like 'lion' as trackworthy works only when you know when the word was not meant literally.

Second, and more likely, from snippets of some of Bin Laden's recently unearthed messages, it's clear that Al-Qaeda is using metaphorical code phrases to refer to plans and goals rather than explicit sentences. Part of this program is probably intended to recognize syntactic (and maybe semantic) variations on a given metaphor so it can be recognized and tracked across multiple messages from different people.

So despite IARPA's dumbass lie about 'encouraging greater cultural understanding', this is yet another signals intelligence target tracking program.

Re:i guess their computers

[datapharmer]

Oh, I suspect they've had that one down for at least a couple decades. I think the issue is more along the lines of intentional obfuscation like "If things thaw any further the queen's gonna be entering the sunset years and even Lassie won't be able to find that well. I hear the winds of change are callin' Vinny to bring the misses on a fishing trip. Its going to be a fine boat ride all hook, line and 'sink-her.... hahaha'" The combination of mismatched metaphors makes it difficult for a computer to analyze the conversation effectively. While it is easy enough for the computer to flag it as suspicious it might be difficult to categorize in an automated fashion: is it about royalty, fishing, murder, weather, old television reruns or a pointless nonsense conversation?