Law Commons^™

Facilitating Issue Categorization & Analysis In Rulemaking, Thomas R. Bruce, Claire Cardie, Cynthia R. Farina, Stephen Purpura

Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative Publications

One task common to all notice-and-comment rulemaking is identifying substantive claims and arguments made in the comments by stakeholders and other members of the public. Extracting and summarizing this material may be helpful to internal decisionmaking; to produce the legally required public explanation of the final rule, it is essential. When comments are lengthy or numerous, natural language processing and machine learning techniques can help the rulewriter work more quickly and comprehensively. Even when a smaller volume of comment material is received, the ability to annotate relevant portions and store information about them in a way that permits retrieval and …