- Stuart W. Shulman, E. Hovy, Jamie Callan, S. Zavestoski. 2005. Language processing technologies for electronic rulemaking: a project highlight. Abstract: In this project, we are developing new text processing tools that help people perform advanced analysis of large collections of text commentary. This problem is increasingly faced by the United States federal government's regulation writers who formulate the rules and regulations that define the details of laws enacted by Congress. Our research focuses on text clustering, text searching using information retrieval, near-duplicate detection, opinion identification, stakeholder characterization, and extractive summarization, as well as the impact of such tools on the process of rulemaking itself. Versions of a Rule-Writer's Workbench will be built by Computer Science researchers at ISI and CMU, deployed annually for experimental use by our government partners, and evaluated by social science researchers from the Library and Information Science and Sociology departments at the Universities of Pittsburgh and San Francisco respectively. This three-year project started in October 2004 and is funded under the National Science Foundation's Digital Government program.
