After Action Review Tools For Team Training with Chat Communications

摘要

As networked digital communications proliferate in military operational command and control, chat messaging is emerging as a preferred communications method for team coordination. In areas where chat messaging provides fundamental support to command and control processes, training methods must incorporate techniques to associate and analyze chat room content to determine effectiveness of the communications. Chat room logs provide a rich source of data for analysis in after action reviews affording considerable insight into the decision-making processes among the training audience. They are also relatively unstructured and replete with competing lexicons, abbreviations, and shortcuts. The employment of multiple chat rooms and multiple interleaved dialogs within them introduces high likelihood of missed or misinterpreted communication. This presents a number of challenges for near- real-time analysis. Recent joint-service guidance in chat room protocols and structures opens new opportunities to revisit investigation of techniques for near-real-time feedback in training programs. In this paper, we describe a research effort to develop chat analysis and filtering methods for after action review tools. The investigation focuses on operational planners tackling time- sensitive problems by employing chat communication for both intelligence assessment and mission planning coordination among a diverse set of expert domains. Our research employs combinations of sorting capabilities using organizational and temporal context given by the new joint service guidance, keyword filtering techniques, and informed analysis considering statistically paired dialog participants. These techniques, when combined with visual timeline based presentation of scenario ground-truth and key milestones in the planning processes, promise to provide a more cogent and effective use of time in after action reviews.