SENSUS addressed the Language Engineering requirements of civil services of the EU member states. It focused on providing technology for two central areas:

Multilingual communication. Cross-border communication in Europe is by its nature multilingual, and language barriers impede fast and efficient communication: Technical speed does not help if a message, once arrived and opened, cannot be read due to language problems. SENSUS supports the workflow of international communication by providing translation and content analysis tools, which give a fast and better understanding of what an incoming text is about. Different levels of sophistication for those translation tools were explored, from simple term substitution to full machine translation; also structured data elements were also looked at.

Multilingual analysis was the second area of SENSUS support.
As part of this task, the focus of SENSUS was to provide the law enforcement and intelligence analysis community of Europe with intelligent, multilingual data analysis, data mining and reporting tools in support of, and in accordance with, their specific intelligence analysis requirements.

SENSUS capitalised on, and extended other relevant projects,
e.g. AVENTINUS, by providing a demonstrator integrating data analysis, data mining and storage and semi-automatic report generation for services involved in intelligence analysis