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No smart software. Just a dumb dinobaby. Oh, the art? Yeah, MidJourney.

Most of the systems incorporating entity extraction have been trained to recognize the names of simple entities and mostly based on the use of capitalization. An “entity” can be a person’s name, the name of an organization, or a location like Niagara Falls, near Buffalo, New York. The river “Niagara” when bound to “Falls” means a geologic feature. The “Buffalo” is not a Bubalina; it is a delightful city with even more pleasing weather.

The same entity extraction process has to work for specialized software used by law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and legal professionals. Compared to entity extraction for consumer-facing applications like Google’s Web search or Apple Maps, the specialized software vendors have to contend with:

• Gang slang in English and other languages; for example, “bumble bee.” This is not an insect; it is a nickname for the Latin Kings.
• Organizations operating in Lao PDR and converted to English words like Zhao Wei’s Kings Romans Casino. Mr. Wei has been allegedly involved in gambling activities in a poorly-regulated region in the Golden Triangle.
• Individuals who use aliases like maestrolive, james44123, or ahmed2004. There are either “real” people behind the handles or they are sock puppets (fake identities).

Why do these variations create a challenge? In order to locate a business, the content processing system has to identify the entity the user seeks. For an investigator, chopping through a thicket of language and idiosyncratic personas is the difference between making progress or hitting a dead end. Automated entity extraction systems can work using smart software, carefully-crafted and constantly updated controlled vocabulary list, or a hybrid system.

Automated entity extraction systems can work using smart software, carefully-crafted and constantly updated controlled vocabulary list, or a hybrid system.

Let’s take an example which confronts a person looking for information about the Ku Group. This is a financial services firm responsible for the Kucoin. The Ku Group is interesting because it has been found guilty in the US for certain financial activities in the State of New York and by the US Securities & Exchange Commission. 

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Interviews

Chris Westphal is the Chief Analytics Officer of DataWalk, a firm providing an investigative and analysis tool to commercial and government organizations. The 12-minute interview covers DataWalk’s unique capabilities, its data and information resources, and the firm’s workflow functionality. The video can be viewed on YouTube at this location.

Stephen E Arnold, March 29, 2022