The United Statement Government has an interest in developing and maintaining a strategic understanding of events, situations, and trends around the world, in a variety of domains.

The information used on developing this understanding comes from many disparate sources, in a variety of genres

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and data types, and as a mixture of structured and unstructured data.

Unstructured data can include text or speech in English and a variety of other languages, as well as images, videos, and other sensor information.

Even structured sources can vary in the expressiveness, semantics, and specificity of their representations.

Moreover, analysis is complicated by the need to overcome the noisy, conflicting, and potentially intentionally deceptive nature of the data.