ACUMEN: Analyzing Cultural Motif Effects in Networks

Background:

ACUMEN is a Phase II Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) project under the umbrella of DARPA's SocialSim program, Brian Kettler PM. We are working with Mark Finlayson and his graduate students at Florida International University (FIU).

SIFT Approach:

Our two goals are (1) through psychological experiments to establish the validity of motifs as carrying significant amounts of implicit information to the people in the cultures where the motif is known, and (2) to assemble a pipeline of linguistic processing components for recognizing the events, actors, and salient props that convey particular motifs in ordinary texts, in conjunction with a large body of text that has been annotated with these features. This as involved identifying a set of motives that are currently understood by people in the cultures we have been able to recruit subjects from for our experiments (Puerto Rican, Irish, Jewish). We have collected a significant corpus of text, and an increasing set of NLP tools as components of our recognition pipeline.