During the reception of a piece of information, we are never passive. Depending on its origin and content, from our personal beliefs and convictions, we bestow upon this piece of information, spontaneously or after reflection, a certain amount of confidence. Too much confidence shows a degree of naivety, whereas an absolute lack of it condemns us as being paranoid. These two attitudes are symmetrically detrimental, not only to the proper perception of this information but also to its use. Beyond these two extremes, each person generally adopts an intermediate position when faced with the reception of information, depending on its provenance and credibility. We still need to understand and explain how these judgements are conceived, in what context and to what end.Spanning the approaches offered by philosophy, military intelligence, algorithmics and information science, this book presents the concepts of information and the confidence placed in it, the methods that militaries, the first to be aware of the need, have or should have adopted, tools to help them, and the prospects that they have opened up. Beyond the military context, the book reveals ways to evaluate information for the good of other fields such as economic intelligence, and, more globally, the informational monitoring by governments and businesses.Contents1. Information: Philosophical Analysis and Strategic Applications, Mouhamadou El Hady Ba and Philippe Capet.2. Epistemic Trust, Gloria Origgi.3. The Fundamentals of Intelligence, Philippe Lemercier.4. Information Evaluation in the Military Domain: Doctrines, Practices and Shortcomings, Philippe Capet and Adrien Revault dAllonnes.5. Multidimensional Approach to Reliability Evaluation of Information Sources, Frdric Pichon, Christophe Labreuche, Bertrand Duqueroie and Thomas Delavallade.6. Uncertainty of an Event and its Markers in Natural Language Processing,Mouhamadou El Hady Ba, Stphanie Brizard, Tanneguy Dulong and Bndicte Goujon.7. Quantitative Information Evaluation: Modeling and Experimental Evaluation,Marie-Jeanne Lesot, Frdric Pichon and Thomas Delavallade.8. When Reported Information Is Second Hand, Laurence Cholvy.9. An Architecture for the Evolution of Trust: Definition and Impact of the Necessary Dimensions of Opinion Making, Adrien Revault dAllonnes.About the AuthorsPhilippe Capet is a project manager and research engineer at Ektimo, working mainly on information management and control in military contexts.Thomas Delavallade is an advanced studies engineer at Thales Communications & Security, working on social media mining in the context of crisis management, cybersecurity and the fight against cybercrime.

This paper addresses the task of detecting Internet buzzes, defined as amplification phenomena, i.e. the diffusion on a very large scale of an Internet content, massively taken up within a short period of time. It proposes two approaches based on the citation graph that represents hyperlinks relation between websites. The first method detects temporal abnormalities in the number of citations of an information source, identifying information sources that undergo a surge of their direct citations. The second method exploits higher level cues, based on the definition of the dynamic cumulative visibility of an article. It captures the notion of citation cascade that is central to the specific type of buzzes related to rumour. Both detection approaches are illustrated, respectively on real data extracted from the Web and on realistic simulated data. The experimental study shows the relevance of the proposed methods and highlights their differences.

This paper proposes a semi-automatic three step information scoring process that starts from constructs representing structured pieces of information and a user query.It first identifies the constructs relevant to answer the user question, based on their similarity to the query.The relevant items are then individually scored, taking into account both the reliability of their source and the certainty the latter expresses through its choice of linguistic terms.Lastly, these individual scores are fused, modeling a corroboration process that takes into account information obsolescence and source relations.This procedure is performed in the framework of possibility theory, relying on the definition of the appropriate aggregation operators.

This paper proposes a model of information propagation mechanisms on the Web, describing all steps of its design and use in simulation. First the characteristics of a real network are studied, in particular in terms of citation policies: from a network extracted from the Web by a crawling tool, distinct publishing behaviours are identified and characterised. The Zero Crossing model for information diffusion is then extended to increase its expressive power and allow it to reproduce this variety of behaviours. Experimental results based on a simulation validate the proposed extension.

In this article we describe the joint effort of experts in linguistics, information extraction and risk assessment to integrate EventSpotter, an automatic event extraction engine, into ADAC, an automated early warning system. By detecting as early as possible weak signals of emerging risks ADAC provides a dynamic synthetic picture of situations involving risk. The ADAC system calculates risk on the basis of fuzzy logic rules operated on a template graph whose leaves are event types. EventSpotter is based on a general purpose natural language dependency parser, XIP, enhanced with domain-specific lexical resources (LexiconGrammar). Its role is to automatically feed the leaves with input data.

In the context of information warfare, rumour detection has become a central issue. From classical media-related campaign, to propaganda and indoctrination that lie at the core of terrorism, rumour is a mean widely used and thus a threat that must be identified as soon as possible, and in the best-case scenario, anticipated and curbed. The emergence of a new informational environment due to the adoption of the Internet as a massive information diffusion medium has led to a situation suitable to the creation and propagation of rumours. Indeed, the Web gives everyone not only the possibility to observe information flows but also the opportunity to influence and create them. In order to tackle the issue of rumour detection, one has to understand the mechanisms underlying their propagation. In this perspective, we believe that it is essential to identify and understand the publishing behaviours of the sources. Therefore, we focus in this paper on the identification of groups of sources with similar publishing characteristics. We propose to tackle this problematic by using clustering methods on data extracted from Web sources. The four resulting clusters obtained from the clustering are then interpreted as groups of Websites behaving similarly and used to characterize publishing behaviours.

In the context of information warfare, rumour detection has become a central issue. From classical media-related campaign, to propaganda and indoctrination that lie at the core of terrorism, rumour is a mean widely used and thus a threat that must be identified as soon as possible, and in the best-case scenario, anticipated and curbed. The emergence of a new informational environment due to the adoption of the Internet as a massive information diffusion medium has led to a situation suitable to the creation and propagation of rumours. Indeed, the Web gives everyone not only the possibility to observe information flows but also the opportunity to influence and create them. In order to tackle the issue of rumour detection, one has to understand the mechanisms underlying their propagation. In this perspective, we believe that it is essential to identify and understand the publishing behaviours of the sources. Therefore, we focus in this paper on the identification of groups of sources with similar publishing characteristics. We propose to tackle this problematic by using clustering methods on data extracted from Web sources. The resulting clusters obtained from the clustering are then interpreted as groups of Websites behaving similarly and used to characterize publishing behaviours.

: The adoption of the Internet as a massive information diffusion medium has considerably modified information dynamics. An increasing amount of available information from uncontrolled, various and unreferenced sources makes this new mediatic environment suitable for various information diffusion phenomena like amplification phenomena that may affect significantly political, strategical or economical matters. Strategical or economical intelligence analysts using open sources have to adapt their methods to face significant and changing information flows. In this context, they need automatic tools to select interesting phenomena among large quantities of data. This paper focuses on substantial variations in open source information diffusion that we call anomalies. Firstly, we introduce a model of a website network considering relevant parameters taking part in the dynamics of information flows over the Web. Then we propose a methodology based on this network to detect anomalies.

In this article we describe the joint effort of experts in linguistics. information extraction and risk assessment to integrate EventSpotter, an automatic event extraction engine, into ADAC, an automated early warning system. By detecting as early as possible weak signals of emerging risks ADAC provides a dynamic synthetic picture of situations involving risk. The ADAC system calculates risk on the basis of fuzzy logic rules operated on a template graph whose leaves are event types. EventSpotter is based on a general purpose natural language dependency parser, XIP enhanced with domain-specific lexical resources (Lexicon-Grammar). Its role is to automatically feed the leaves with input data.

La cotation de l’information a principalement ete etudiee a l’aune des documents doctrinaux du renseignement militaire dont les limites sur le sujet sont cependant manifestes. Nous etudions ici, a des fins de modelisation, la cotation inscrite dans le cadre general de la veille informationnelle en source ouverte, qui preoccupe des domaines tant militaires que civils. En partant d’informations extraites automatiquement par analyse linguistique de documents textuels, nous proposons une modelisation de l’ensemble du processus de cotation, afin d’obtenir une estimation de la confiance a accorder a ces informations d’origine. Cette modelisation s’appuie d’une part sur l’evaluation de l’incertitude associee a une information prise isolement, en affaiblissant l’incertitude qu’exprime sa source par la fiabilite de cette derniere. Elle requiert d’autre part l’agregation des incertitudes individuelles associees aux differentes informations portant sur un meme evenement. Nous abordons en outre les difficultes techniques soulevees par notre modelisation et proposons des elements de solution. Un exemple semi-fictif illustre enfin la demarche adoptee.