Information Evaluation

During the reception of a piece of information, we are never passive. Depending on its origin and content, from our personal beliefs and convictions, we bestow upon this piece of information, spontaneously or after reflection, a certain amount of confidence. Too much confidence shows a degree of naivety, whereas an absolute lack of it condemns us as being paranoid. These two attitudes are symmetrically detrimental, not only to the proper perception of this information but also to its use. Beyond these two extremes, each person generally adopts an intermediate position when faced with the reception of information, depending on its provenance and credibility. We still need to understand and explain how these judgements are conceived, in what context and to what end. Spanning the approaches offered by philosophy, military intelligence, algorithmics and information science, this book presents the concepts of information and the confidence placed in it, the methods that militaries, the first to be aware of the need, have or should have adopted, tools to help them, and the prospects that they have opened up. Beyond the military context, the book reveals ways to evaluate information for the good of other fields such as economic intelligence, and, more globally, the informational monitoring by governments and businesses. Contents 1. Information: Philosophical Analysis and Strategic Applications, Mouhamadou El Hady Ba and Philippe Capet. 2. Epistemic Trust, Gloria Origgi. 3. The Fundamentals of Intelligence, Philippe Lemercier. 4. Information Evaluation in the Military Domain: Doctrines, Practices and Shortcomings, Philippe Capet and Adrien Revault d’Allonnes. 5. Multidimensional Approach to Reliability Evaluation of Information Sources, Frédéric Pichon, Christophe Labreuche, Bertrand Duqueroie and Thomas Delavallade. 6. Uncertainty of an Event and its Markers in Natural Language Processing, Mouhamadou El Hady Ba, Stéphanie Brizard, Tanneguy Dulong and Bénédicte Goujon. 7. Quantitative Information Evaluation: Modeling and Experimental Evaluation, Marie-Jeanne Lesot, Frédéric Pichon and Thomas Delavallade. 8. When Reported Information Is Second Hand, Laurence Cholvy. 9. An Architecture for the Evolution of Trust: Definition and Impact of the Necessary Dimensions of Opinion Making, Adrien Revault d’Allonnes. About the Authors Philippe Capet is a project manager and research engineer at Ektimo, working mainly on information management and control in military contexts. Thomas Delavallade is an advanced studies engineer at Thales Communications & Security, working on social media mining in the context of crisis management, cybersecurity and the fight against cybercrime.

Table of Contents:
Foreword xi Alain JUILLET Introduction xvii Philippe CAPET and Thomas DELAVALLADE Chapter 1 Information: Philosophical Analysis and Strategic Applications 1 Mouhamadou El Hady BA and Philippe CAPET 1.1. Introduction 1 1.2. State of the art in philosophy 2 1.2.1. History 3 1.2.2 Information at the crossroads between epistemology and philosophy of language 5 1.3. Information warfare 15 1.3.1. The role of falsehood and of intentions 17 1.3.2. Deception, simulation and dissimulation 19 1.3.3. Addressees of information or the art of communicating 24 1.3.4. Information warfare as a play on beliefs 25 1.3.5. Disinformation and associated notions 26 1.4. Conclusion Comprehending information in order to evaluate it 31 1.5. Bibliography 32 Chapter 2 Epistemic Trust 35 Gloria ORIGGI 2.1. Introduction 35 2.2. What is social epistemology? 36 2.3. History of the discipline 39 2.4. Social epistemology and externalism 40 2.5. Realism and constructivism in social epistemology 41 2.6. Believing other people 43 2.7. Reductionism and antireductionism 45 2.8. Trust and communication 49 2.9. Conclusion 51 2.10. Bibliography 52 Chapter 3 The Fundamentals of Intelligence 55 Philippe LEMERCIER 3.1. Introduction 55 3.2. Information evaluation in the language of intelligence 56 3.2.1. A context which is not clearly defined, open to multiple interpretations 56 3.2.2 An informational model historically based on the evaluation of information and of sources 64 3.3. Attempt to formalize generic models appropriate for the new issues facing the intelligence services 76 3.3.1. Functional analysis as a support for definition 76 3.3.2. Paradigm shifts 77 3.3.3. Attempt at a rigorous definition of intelligence 87 3.4. Conclusion 99 3.5. Bibliography 100 Chapter 4 Information Evaluation in the Military Domain: Doctrines, Practices and Shortcomings 103 Philippe CAPET and Adrien REVAULT D’ALLONNES 4.1. Introduction 103 4.2. Presentation of the existing situation 104 4.2.1. Information evaluation in the intelligence cycle 105 4.2.2. Reliability and credibility of information 108 4.3. Illustrative scenario with multi-sourced information 110 4.4. From an inaccurate definition to an attractive but unusable concept 112 4.4.1. Estimation of reliability 112 4.4.2. Estimation of credibility 115 4.4.3. Combining dimensions – what is the comparability of the ratings? 119 4.4.4. Raw data, enriched intelligence – can information evaluation qualify everything? 121 4.5. A few suggested refinements to information evaluation techniques 122 4.6. Conclusion and future prospects 124 4.7. Bibliography 125 Chapter 5 Multidimensional Approach to Reliability Evaluation of Information Sources 129 Frédéric PICHON, Christophe LABREUCHE, Bertrand DUQUEROIE and Thomas DELAVALLADE 5.1. Introduction 129 5.2. Multi-criteria aggregation by the Choquet integral: application to the evaluation of the reliability of sources 132 5.2.1. Multi-criteria decision support 133 5.2.2. Multi-Attribute Utility Theory 134 5.2.3. Concepts of measurement and construction of utility functions 135 5.2.4. Aggregation function A: limitations of the weighted sum 137 5.2.5. The Choquet integral 138 5.2.6. Determination of the aggregation function A 139 5.2.7. Multi-level preference models 140 5.2.8. Estimation of a degree of reliability via the multi-criteria approach 141 5.3. Reliability of sources on Twitter 142 5.3.1. Twitter 142 5.3.2. Reliability of sources on Twitter: state of the art 143 5.4. Multi-criteria model for the reliability of Twitter accounts 148 5.5. Conclusion 156 5.6. Bibliography 156 Chapter 6 Uncertainty of an Event and its Markers in Natural Language Processing 161 Mouhamadou El Hady BA, Stéphanie BRIZARD, Tanneguy DULONG and Bénédicte GOUJON 6.1. Introduction 161 6.2. State of the art 162 6.2.1. Detection of named entities 162 6.2.2. Detection of events 164 6.2.3. Detection of uncertainty 164 6.3. Model for representing the uncertainty of an event 168 6.3.1. Named entity model 168 6.3.2. Event model 168 6.3.3. Uncertainty model 169 6.4. Linguistic resources 172 6.4.1. Technological context 172 6.4.2. Development and test corpora 172 6.4.3. Linguistic resources for named entity recognition 173 6.4.4. Linguistic resources for event extraction 174 6.4.5. Linguistic resources for uncertainty extraction 176 6.5. Realization 181 6.6. Conclusions and perspectives 182 6.7. Bibliography 184 Chapter 7 Quantitative Information Evaluation: Modeling and Experimental Evaluation 187 Marie-Jeanne LESOT, Frédéric PICHON and Thomas DELAVALLADE 7.1. Introduction 187 7.2. Formal framework used: possibility theory 190 7.2.1. Reasons for using possibility theory 190 7.2.2. Recap of possibility theory 192 7.2.3. Aggregation operators for possibility distributions 194 7.2.4. Application to information evaluation 197 7.3. Proposed architecture 198 7.3.1. General principle 199 7.3.2. Inputs to the process of information evaluation 200 7.3.3. Evaluation of individual elements 206 7.3.4. Fusion of individual ratings 209 7.4. Experimental study 212 7.4.1. Realistic generation of the uncertainty of a source 213 7.4.2. Description of the experiments 217 7.4.3 Measures of quality 221 7.4.4. Results 222 7.5. Conclusions 226 7.6. Bibliography 228 Chapter 8 When Reported Information Is Second Hand 231 Laurence CHOLVY 8.1. Introduction 231 8.2. Domains involved and related works 234 8.2.1. Document mining on the Web 234 8.2.2. Military intelligence 234 8.2.3. Analysis of press reports 235 8.2.4 Modal logic, validity and completeness of information sources 236 8.2.5. Modal logic and modeling of lying 238 8.3. A logical model to decide whether reported information is credible 239 8.3.1. Logical formalism 240 8.3.2. One level of imbrication 241 8.3.3. Two levels of imbrication 243 8.3.4. Conclusion about the logical model 245 8.4. Taking account of uncertainty. A model for estimating the degree of credibility of a reported piece of information 245 8.4.1. The numerical model 246 8.4.2. One level of imbrication 247 8.4.3. Two levels of imbrication 249 8.4.4. Conclusion about the numerical model 251 8.5. Use of the logical model to generate hypotheses about the information sources 251 8.5.1. Motivation 251 8.5.2. An algorithm to generate responses 253 8.5.3. Illustration 253 8.5.4. Conclusion about the generation of hypotheses 254 8.6. Conclusion 255 8.7. Supplements 256 8.7.1. Main notions of logic 256 8.7.2. Main notions from the Theory of Evidence 258 8.8. Bibliography 259 Chapter 9 An Architecture for the Evolution of Trust: Definition and Impact of the Necessary Dimensions of Opinion Making 261 Adrien REVAULT D’ ALLONNES 9.1. Introduction 261 9.2. A perspective on trust 262 9.3. Dimensions of information evaluation 263 9.4. General evaluation of the source: reliability 269 9.4.1. Evaluation of reliability in the original scenario 270 9.5. Contextual evaluation of the source: competence 271 9.5.1. Evaluation of competence in the original scenario 271 9.6. General content evaluation: plausibility 272 9.6.1. Evaluation of plausibility in the original scenario 273 9.7. Contextual content evaluation: credibility 273 9.7.1. Evaluation of credibility in the original scenario 275 9.8. Global expression of trust 275 9.9. Architecture of information evaluation:characteristics 276 9.9.1. Order of integration of the dimensions 277 9.9.2. Sequentiality of the information evaluation chain 279 9.10. Architecture of information evaluation: a description 279 9.10.1. Reminders about the evaluation of the dimensions 280 9.10.2. Reliability of the source 280 9.10.3. Competence and plausibility 281 9.10.4. Credibility 282 9.11. Personalization of information evaluation: modeling levels of gullibility 283 9.11.1. Reliability of the source 284 9.11.2. Competence and plausibility 285 9.11.3. Credibility 287 9.11.4. Discussion 288 9.12. Conclusion 290 9.13. Bibliography 291 List of Authors 295 Index 297

About the Author :
Philippe Capet is a project manager and research engineer at Ektimo, working mainly on information management and control in military contexts. Thomas Delavallade is an advanced studies engineer at Thales Communications & Security, working on social media mining in the context of crisis management, cybersecurity and the fight against cybercrime.