Information security is a primary mission of the National Security Agency. In pursuing this mission NSA develops security technology and security products. Network security applications present significant challenges for the National Information Infrastructure. NSA will initiate programs that address authentication, wireless interoperability and real-time operating aspects of network security. NSA will develop authentication techniques (e.g., biometric) for network access control and will create a mechanism for establishing standards of security and interoperability in emerging wireless PCs and cellular networks. NSA and NIST will integrate Smartcard and biometric technology to permit authentication of a person to a network. In collaboration with NIST and hardware and software manufacturers, NSA will develop technology to integrate real time and data communications in a secure multimedia multi-terminal network environment.
Over the past few years there has been a significant research program funded by ARPA, NSA and other government agencies to develop and test automatic machine translation algorithms. While this research program has been constrained to a limited source of documents and a limited set of languages, results so far have been very promising. However a follow-on program is needed to transfer the results of this research into operational use. NSA will sponsor work to extend the applicability of the best language translation algorithms to more languages and more general domains; to improve the computational efficiency of those algorithms; to port those algorithms to networked workstations; and to develop good human-machine interfaces to allow easy control and operation of the system.
For textual information, there are ongoing research programs for document retrieval by topic, for data extraction and for machine translation. For several years, ARPA, NSA and other agencies have conducted and sponsored research programs to develop algorithms for large vocabulary, continuous speech recognition. A follow-on to this research program is needed to further improve the recognition algorithms and to build a prototype speech recognition system and a system capable of processing continuous speech dictation of arbitrary text. NSA will sponsor work to extend the applicability of the best large vocabulary continuous speech recognition systems to vocabularies with sizes up to 50,000 words and to languages other than English; to improve the computational efficiency of those algorithms; to port those algorithms to networked workstations; and to develop effective human- machine interfaces to allow easy training, testing and general use of the system. The goal of the program is to deliver a usable prototype system for taking dictation on arbitrary topics using continuous speech input.
A major effort needs to be initiated for development of efficient and reliable text summarization technology. Text summarization will combine existing text generation systems with a new understanding of how to identify key points of information in a text to reduce the volume of text an analyst needs to review. Prototype development for text summarization and relevance feedback from users is a near-term goal of the program.
The seamless and transparent access to multiple heterogeneous databases with intelligent, integrated run-time reasoning is the major component of a large knowledge base effort. NSA will develop a prototype environment of the future where the end-user of the data, the application builder, and the data administrator all see, not a collection of relatively unintelligible, difficult-to-access databases, but an integrated information space in terms directly meaningful and accessible to them.
In support of digital library applications, NSA will develop improved interfaces to information resources, including enhancements to WAIS.