Entity Workspace: An Evidence File That Aids Memory, Inference, and Reading

An intelligence analyst often needs to keep track of more facts than can be held in human memory. As a result, analysts use a notebook or evidence file to record facts learned so far. In practice, the evidence file is often an electronic document into which text snippets and hand-typed notes are placed. While this kind of evidence file is easy to read and edit, it provides little help for making sense of the captured information. We describe Entity Workspace, a tool designed to be used in place of a traditional evidence file. Entity Workspace combines user interface and entity extraction technologies to build up an explicit model of important entities (people, places, organizations, phone numbers, etc.) and their relationships. Using this model, it helps the analyst find and re-find facts rapidly, notice connections between entities, and identify good documents and entities to explore next. 1 The Need for a Better Evidence File An intelligence analyst working on a case may encounter hundreds of documents. Each document, in turn, may contain any number of facts relevant to the case. The number of facts can quickly become too large to be held in human memory alone. For this reason, analysts often use a notebook or evidence file to record the facts uncovered so far. This evidence file may be an electronic document into which the analyst places snippets of text and hand-typed notes about the case. Electronic documents have a number of capabilities that make them suitable for use as evidence files. For example, they are easy to edit and read. They can hold both textual and pictorial material. They support full text search. Finally, as the analyst’s product is generally an electronic document, evidence stored in an electronic document is easy to re-purpose for use in the final report. However, as used today, electronic documents lack the capability to help analysts make sense of the facts captured in them. Although the computer system knows that the analyst has selected certain pieces of text, it doesn’t know which entities mentioned in this text are important, nor how they are related to each other. In this paper, we describe a software evidence file called Entity Workspace that helps the analyst explicitly represent information about relevant entities and their