Information Evaluation (PDF)

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.