Basis Technology developed its Odyssey Digital Forensics™ application to help investigators locate information in foreign language documents that the investigators may miss using conventional forensics and search tools.  “Many analysts take it for granted that their search tools can be used to locate important keywords in all languages,” says Basis.  “Since popular forensics tools do not include linguistic processing modules, this is an incorrect and potentially dangerous assumption.  These tools may only be finding a small percentage of documents which contain the specific keywords.”

First, Odyssey enables experts and non-experts alike to capture data off hard disks, while also documenting the integrity and source of the data.  From a captured disk image, Odyssey Digital Forensics then analyzes the file system to extract and recover files, and extract text from them.  Odyssey then uses the Rosette® Linguistics Platform to preprocess multilingual text with its text normalization functions.

After text normalization, Odyssey invokes the dtSearch Text Retrieval Engine functionality to build a search index.  The analyst can then type in search terms through a custom graphical interface to optimize retrieval of the international data, including hit highlighting of international language search terms.  Odyssey supports Middle Eastern languages (Arabic, Persian), East Asian languages (Chinese, Korean, and Japanese) as well as a variety of European language content.

“With the embedded dtSearch Engine, Odyssey Digital Forensics Keyword Searching System’s smart search crosses language and file format ‘barriers,’” explains Basis.  “Analysts need not know all the languages of the data to perform searches that quickly bring significant files to the fore.”

For example, “a Chinese document can be discovered whether it includes Simplified script used in Mainland China or Traditional script used in Taiwan.  Arabic documents can be found with prefixes like 'al-' ignored on keywords, and European verbs can be matched in different conjugation patterns.”  The screen shot below shows retrieval with hit highlighting of a Chinese document sample using Odyssey.