Mitre Corporation

About: Mitre Corporation is a company organization based out in Bedford, Massachusetts, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Air traffic control & National Airspace System. The organization has 4884 authors who have published 6053 publications receiving 124808 citations. The organization is also known as: Mitre & MITRE.

Mixed-Initiative Development of Language Processing Systems

Abstract: Historically, tailoring language processing systems to specific domains and languages for which they were not originally built has required a great deal of effort. Recent advances in corpus-based manual and automatic training methods have shown promise in reducing the time and cost of this porting process. These developments have focused even greater attention on the bottleneck of acquiring reliable, manually tagged training data. This paper describes a new set of integrated tools, collectively called the Alembic Workbench, that uses a mixed-initiative approach to "bootstrapping" the manual tagging process, with the goal of reducing the overhead associated with corpus development. Initial empirical studies using the Alembic Workbench to annotate "named entities" demonstrates that this approach can approximately double the production rate. As an added benefit, the combined efforts of machine and user produce domain specific annotation rules that can be used to annotate similar texts automatically through the Alembic-NLP system. The ultimate goal of this project is to enable end users to generate a practical domain-specific information extraction system within a single session.

Outerjoin simplification and reordering for query optimization

Abstract: Conventional database optimizers take full advantage of associativity and commutativity properties of join to implement e cient and powerful optimizations on select/project/join queries. However, only limited optimization is performed on other binary operators. In this paper, we present the theory and algorithms needed to generate alternative evaluation orders for the optimization of queries containing outerjoins. Our results include both a complete set of transformation rules, suitable for new-generation, transformation-based optimizers, and a bottom-up join enumeration algorithm compatible with those used by traditional optimizers.

A weakest-adversary security metric for network configuration security analysis

Abstract: A security metric measures or assesses the extent to which a system meets its security objectives. Since meaningful quantitative security metrics are largely unavailable, the security community primarily uses qualitative metrics for security. In this paper, we present a novel quantitative metric for the security of computer networks that is based on an analysis of attack graphs. The metric measures the security strength of a network in terms of the strength of the weakest adversary who can successfully penetrate the network. We present an algorithm that computes the minimal sets of required initial attributes for the weakest adversary to possess in order to successfully compromise a network; given a specific network configuration, set of known exploits, a specific goal state, and an attacker class (represented by a set of all initial attacker attributes). We also demonstrate, by example, that diverse network configurations are not always beneficial for network security in terms of penetrability.

A rule-based system for document image segmentation

Abstract: A rule-based system for automatically segmenting a document image into regions of text and nontext is presented. The initial stages of the system perform image enhancement functions such as adaptive thresholding, morphological processing, and skew detection and correction. The image segmentation process consists of smearing the original image via the run length smoothing algorithm, calculating the connected components locations and statistics, and filtering (segmenting) the image based on these statistics. The text regions can be converted (via an optical character reader) to a computer-searchable form, and the nontext regions can be extracted and preserved. The rule-based structure allows easy fine tuning of the algorithmic steps to produce robust rules, to incorporate additional tools (as they become available), and to handle special segmentation needs. >