Collaborative Research: Language Processing Technology for Electronic Rulemaking

如今，许多人，包括新闻分析师、民意调查员、广告商和政府法规撰写者，都需要解释、构建并快速掌握大量基于意见的文本。需要进行新的研究来开发文本处理工具，以便对大型文本集合进行高级分析。本研究将以当前的文本处理技术为基础，如文本聚类、使用信息检索进行文本搜索和提取摘要，以构建和测试适合在电子规则制定环境中工作的政府人员的特定需求的工具。这个项目的重点是联邦政府的几千名法规制定者，他们受雇于大约200个机构，按照严格的脚本程序，制定规章制度，定义我们法律的细节。本项目将尝试解决语言处理研究的几个核心新问题。反过来，它将部署和评估规则编写器的工作台；一套语言工具，使法规作家，单独或联合，以获得材料的详细和多维的概述。这项研究的潜在影响远远超出了IT和社会科学学术界。它将探索诸如作者类型、意见/影响确定和近重复检测等新问题。即使只有少数新技术是有效的，它们最终也可能帮助成千上万的监管制定者更有效地与我们日益数字化的社会中数百万公民的评论进行沟通和理解，并为我们所有人制定更好的监管规则。

Collaborative Research: Language Processing Technology for Electronic Rulemaking Many people today, including news analysts, opinion pollsters, advertisers, and government regulation writers need to interpret, structure, and rapidly master large quantities of opinion-based text. New research is needed to develop text-processing tools that can perform advanced analysis of large text collections. This research will build on current text processing technologies, such as text clustering, text searching using information retrieval, and extractive summaries, to build and test tools tailored to the specific needs of government personnel working in an electronic rulemaking environment. This project's focus is the federal government's several-thousand regulation writers, employed in some 200 agencies, who formulate, in a tightly scripted procedure, the rules and regulations that define the details of our laws. This project will attempt to solve several novel problems central to language processing research. In turn, it will deploy and evaluate a Rule-Writer's Workbench; a set of language tools that enables regulation writers, singly or jointly, to obtain a detailed and multidimensional overview of the material. . This research has the potential to impact far beyond IT and social science academia. It will explore such novel issues as author typing, opinion/affect determination, and near-duplicate detection. If even just a handful of the new technologies are effective, they eventually may help thousands of regulation writers more effectively communicate with and understand the comments of millions of citizens in our increasingly digitized society, and produce better regulatory rules for all of us.