In the past, public comment
was submitted to the U.S. federal government primarily in paper form. However
during the last several years the government has begun to allow comments to
be submitted electronically in some cases. Recently a new Regulations.gov Web site was created
to facilitate the examination and commenting on proposed regulations by citizens.
As a part of this trend toward "Digital
Government," many other federal agencies are also in the process of experimentation
and adoption of e-rulemaking systems
The use information and other
digital technologies in the process of rulemaking, including the electronic
soliciation and processing of public comments, is called "E-Rulemaking".
E-Rulemaking offers opportunities for the government to reduce its costs and
improve the quality of notice and comment rulemaking, but it also poses a
variety of new social, political, and technical challenges. These issues will become increasingly more important as the regulatory rulemaking process and the
volume of electronic comments become more
digital.
The Carnegie
Mellon E-Rulemaking project focuses primarily on a set of technical challenges
related to effective use of large amounts of unstructured public commentary.
Citizens and government administrators need a variety of navigation aids
and analysis tools to help them understand the contents of large public comment
databases. These aids and tools include full-text search, automatic construction
of browsing hierarchies, frequency analysis of discussion topics, and summarization
of similar comments, as well as more complex analysis tools that identify
stakeholder communities represented in a set of comments. The underlying
technologies are primarily Information Retrieval, Text Datamining, and simple
forms of Natural Language Processing.
The initial
research effort is centered around a set of about 22,000 public comments
from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) National Organic Program
(NOP). This is a small subset of the 277,000 comments that were received
for a single proposed regulation in 1998. We expect to begin working with
additional, and larger, datasets during the summer of 2003. Included are resources that can assist researchers in conducting
experiments in this field. This includes the subset of USDA public comment
mentioned above available for download along with corpus information and statistics.
People
The E-Rulemaking Project
is currently a joint initiative between the Language Technologies Instittue in
the School of Computer Science and
the Heinz School of Public Policy and Management. Some
of the people involved in the project include:
References
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Updated on April 21, 2003.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~callan/
