Bridging the communication gap:
ATHENA’s CML in international crises
When the bombs exploded in Brussels in March 2016,
the world looked on in horror at the carnage wrought at
Brussels International Airport and Maelbeek metro
station in the city center. The very first reports of
damage, injury and death came from eye witnesses via
social media and included photos, videos and text
messages. This clearly showed how social media can
play an incredible role as a source of information for
first responders, but that is only if they can make sense
of the information received.
The Brussels attacks also highlight one issue very
clearly: there are many languages with which people
communicate. Many crises may be limited to
geographical areas in which a single natural language
is so dominant that nearly all of the pertinent
communications about the crisis are in that single
language. But in a situation such as that in Brussels,
not just because Belgium has three official languages,
but because many of the victims were international
travelers in transit.
Furthermore, in large scale crisis, such as the 2010
earthquake in Haiti or the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami,
there are often external aid organizations such as Red
Cross and Medécins sans Frontières that come in from
elsewhere to help to cope with the aftermath. In Haiti
there were groups from such diverse countries as
China, Israel, Iceland, the US and Korea, to name but a
few. Even if a common language such as English was
used among these emergency response groups, it was
not one of the two native languages in Haiti, thus
guaranteeing at least tri-lingual social media
communications.
Thus, one of the goals of ATHENA has been to develop
an automated solution enabling the use of multiple
languages in large-scale crisis situations. But the use of
multiple languages comes at a cost: much processing
Multinational team of Athena CCCID operators during
terrorist crisis exercise in Ljubljana during which a first
test of the CML module allowed non-Slovenian
speaking operators to have insight into the events.
power is needed to translate from language to
language, which may be easily stretched very thin
during a time at which a huge volume of timesensitive information is being generated.
However, by using ATHENA’s Crisis Management
Language (CML) as a basis for standardized
communication, a shallow methodology (“CML-Lite”)
for converting into and out of different languages
efficiently has been derived as a result of the
ATHENA project.
The original core of CML was derived from the Joint
Command and Control Computer Information
Exchange Data Model (JC3IEDM), a data model used
for interoperability in NATO. The terms and their
meanings within the data model were selected and
agreed to by 28 nations, reflecting a common
understanding of each term by all of these nations.
November
2016
CML contains standardized expressions for specific
events, objects and activities. Humans have many ways
of saying the same thing; for example, one may say
someone is “injured”, “wounded”, “hurt”, “bleeding”, etc.
By mapping all the synonyms describing an event or
activity onto a single standardized expression,
translation is simplified.
Group of Slovenian “refugees” using Athena and social
apps such as twitter and Facebook during natural
catastrophe exercise in Ljubljana in January 2016.
Reducing the complexity of translation by mapping
synonyms to a single CML expression.
For example, if a tweet is sent containing the German
“3 verletzt” a simple mapping over CML will result in the
message “3 injured” on to English speakers. Thus,
“CML in the middle” allows quick, efficient and
unambiguous translation:
At present the CML prototype module is capable of
supporting English, German, Slovenian and Polish, with
hopes to expand to Turkish and other languages used
within the European Union.
For further information about Project
ATHENA please visit
www.projectathena.eu
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CML in the middle.
November
2016