Alicia Iriberri

Crime Information Extraction from Police and Witness Narrative Reports

To solve crimes, investigators often rely on interviews with witnesses, victims, or criminals themselves. The interviews are transcribed and the pertinent data is contained in narrative form. To solve one crime, investigators may need to interview multiple people and then analyze the narrative reports. There are several difficulties with this process: interviewing people is time consuming, the interviews - sometimes conducted by multiple officers - need to be combined, and the resulting information may still be incomplete. For example, victims or witnesses are often too scared or embarrassed to report or prefer to remain anonymous. We are developing an online reporting system that combines natural language processing with insights from the cognitive interview approach to obtain more information from witnesses and victims. We report here on information extraction from police and witness narratives. We achieved high precision, 94% and 96% and recall, 85% and 90%, for both narrative types.

The Virtual Society: Its Driving Forces, Arrangements, Practices, and Implications

Publisher Summary This chapter provides insights into the forces, dilemmas, and implications of the oncoming virtual society. The virtual society transcends cities, states, nations, and continents, and represents an evolutionary as opposed to a revolutionary movement. Although information technology (IT) is the main enabling force of the virtual society, other components are also at work, namely, economic, political, cultural, and social forces. The finite level forces include global economies, policies, and politics, enlightened and diversified population, and the information technology infrastructure. These forces continue to create the necessary conditions for the eventual realization of the virtual society. Current virtual workplace arrangements and practices of virtuality include telework (at the individual level), virtual teams (at the group level), virtual corporations (at the organizational level), and virtual communities (at the community level). Other arrangements and practices continue to evolve. Once a critical mass of these virtual activities and practices permeates all levels of society, the outcome will be the virtual society. The economic, social, political, and technological forces unleashed by the information society are inevitably leading to the virtual society.

The Virtual Society

Publisher Summary This chapter provides insights into the forces, dilemmas, and implications of the oncoming virtual society. The virtual society transcends cities, states, nations, and continents, and represents an evolutionary as opposed to a revolutionary movement. Although information technology (IT) is the main enabling force of the virtual society, other components are also at work, namely, economic, political, cultural, and social forces. The finite level forces include global economies, policies, and politics, enlightened and diversified population, and the information technology infrastructure. These forces continue to create the necessary conditions for the eventual realization of the virtual society. Current virtual workplace arrangements and practices of virtuality include telework (at the individual level), virtual teams (at the group level), virtual corporations (at the organizational level), and virtual communities (at the community level). Other arrangements and practices continue to evolve. Once a critical mass of these virtual activities and practices permeates all levels of society, the outcome will be the virtual society. The economic, social, political, and technological forces unleashed by the information society are inevitably leading to the virtual society.

Reporting On-Campus Crime Online: User Intention to Use

National surveys demonstrate that millions of crimes go unreported in the United States. Several reasons may contribute to this lack of reporting and we are investigating these potential reasons and how they may be addressed. We are developing an online system that provides an anonymous and secure mechanism for both victims and witnesses to report crimes to police. The system is being implemented and tested on a university campus. Potential users (i.e., students, staff) were surveyed to determine their intent to use the system. Respondents claimed to report crimes already, which is in contrast with the findings from the national surveys. Our respondents found the online system useful, accessible, and safe to report crime, but the type of crime and the urgency of response is a determinant in the decision to use the system versus reporting it to a live person.

Internet Crime Reporting: Evaluation of a Crime Reporting and Investigative Interview System by Comparison with a Non-Interactive Reporting Alternative

This study reports on the evaluation of a crime reporting and investigative interview system, i-recall . i-recall emulates a police officer conducting a cognitive interview (CI). It incorporates CI techniques to enhance witness memory retrieval and leverages natural language processing technology to support understanding of witness narratives.In a controlled user study i-recall was compared to a non-interactive textbox computer system. Sophomore college students acted as witnesses to a videotaped staged crime and reported what they saw using one of the two alternative reporting methods.Results indicate that i-recall outperformed the textbox system significantly in one of two measures, completeness of report. On average i-recall elicited 14 percent of information from witnesses and the textbox system elicited five (5) percent of information, all with 94 percent accuracy. i-recall is a promising Internet reporting alternative. Future work will evaluate i-recall by comparing it to a human expert cognitive interviewer.