A Conceptual Methodology for Dealing with Terrorism "Narratives"

This paper concerns the use of in-depth analytical/conceptual techniques pertaining to the Artificial Intelligence domain to deal with narrative information (or “narratives”) in the terrorism- and crime-related areas. More precisely, the authors supply details about NKRL (Narrative Knowledge Representation Language), a representation and querying/inferencing environment especially created for an advanced exploitation of all types of narrative information. This description will be integrated with concrete examples that illustrate the use of NKRL tools in two recent ‘defence’ applications, the first dealing with a corpus of “Southern Philippines terrorism” news stories used in an R&D European project, the second, carried out in collaboration with the French “Délégation Générale pour l’Armement” (DGA, Central Bureau for Armament), which handles news stories about Afghanistan’s war.