Current approaches to automated information evaluation and their applicability to Priority Intelligence Requirement answering

Doctrinally, Priority Intelligence Requirements (PIRs) represent information that the commander needs to know in order to make a decision or achieve a desired effect. Networked warfare provides the intelligence officer with access to multitudes of sensor outputs and reports, often from unfamiliar sources. Counterinsurgency requires evaluating information across all PMESII-PT categories: Political, Military, Economic, Social, Infrastructure Information, Physical Environment and Time. How should analysts evaluate this information? NATO´s STANAG (Standard Agreement) 2022 requires that every piece of information in intelligence reports used to answer PIRs should be evaluated along two independent dimensions: the reliability of its source and the credibility of the information. Recent developments in information retrieval technologies, including social search technologies, incorporate metrics of information evaluation, reliability and credibility, such as Google´s PageRank. In this paper, we survey various current approaches to automatic information evaluation and explore their applicability to the information evaluation and PIR answering tasks.