Law Commons^™

The Value Of Words: Narrative As Evidence In Policymaking, Dmitry Epstein, Josiah Heidt, Cynthia R. Farina

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Policymakers today rely primarily on statistical, financial, and other forms of technical data as their basis for decision-making. Yet, there is a potentially underestimated value in substantive reflections of the members of the public who will be affected by a particular piece of regulation. We discuss the value of narratives as input in the policy making process, based on our experience with Regulation Room–a product of an interdisciplinary initiative using innovative web technologies in real-time online experimentation. We describe professional policymakers and professional commenters as a community of practice that has limited shared repertoire with the lay members of the …

Balancing Inclusion And “Enlightened Understanding” In Designing Online Civic Participation Systems: Experiences From Regulation Room, Cynthia R. Farina, Mary J. Newhart, Josiah Heidt, Jackeline Solivan

Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative Publications

New forms of online citizen participation in government decision making have been fostered in the United States (U.S.) under the Obama Administration. Use of Web information technologies have been encouraged in an effort to create more back-and-forth communication between citizens and their government. These “Civic Participation 2.0” attempts to open the government up to broader public participation are based on three pillars of open government—transparency, participation, and collaboration. Thus far, the Administration has modeled Civic Participation 2.0 almost exclusively on the Web 2.0 ethos, in which users are enabled to shape the discussion and encouraged to assess the value of …

Regulation Room: How The Internet Improves Public Participation In Rulemaking, Jackeline Solivan, Cynthia R. Farina

Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative Publications

Cornell eRulemaking Initiative (CeRI) designed and operated Regulation Room, a pilot project that provides an online environment for people and groups to learn about, discuss, and react to selected proposed federal rules. The project is a unique collaboration between CeRI academic researchers and the government. The U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) was CeRI's first agency partner and chose Regulation Room as its first open government "flagship initiative." USDOT received a White House Open Government Leading Practices Award for its collaboration in the project. CeRI owns, designs, operates, and controls Regulation Room, but works closely with partner agencies to identify suitable …

Regulation Room: Getting "More, Better" Civic Participation In Complex Government Policymaking, Cynthia R. Farina, Dmitry Epstein, Josiah Heidt, Mary J. Newhart

Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative Publications

Purpose – Rulemaking (the process agencies use to make new health, safety, social and economic regulations) is one of the US Government’s most important policymaking methods and has long been a target for e-government efforts. Although broad transparency and participation rights are part of its legal structure, significant barriers prevent effective engagement by many citizens. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Design/methodology/approach – RegulationRoom.org is an online experimental e-participation platform, designed and operated by Cornell e-rulemaking Initiative (CeRI), the cross-disciplinary CeRI. Using the Regulation Roomas a case study, this paper addresseswhat capacities are required for effective civic engagement and …

Active Learning For E-Rulemaking: Public Comment Categorization, Stephen Purpura, Claire Cardie, Jesse Simons

Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative Publications

We address the e-rulemaking problem of reducing the manual labor required to analyze public comment sets. In current and previous work, for example, text categorization techniques have been used to speed up the comment analysis phase of e-rulemaking - by classifying sentences automatically, according to the rule-specific issues [2] or general topics that they address [7, 8]. Manually annotated data, however, is still required to train the supervised inductive learning algorithms that perform the categorization. This paper, therefore, investigates the application of active learning methods for public comment categorization: we develop two new, general-purpose, active learning techniques to selectively sample …

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 …

An Erulemaking Corpus: Identifying Substantive Issues In Public Comments, Claire Cardie, Cynthia R. Farina, Matt Rawding, Adil Aijaz

Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative Publications

We describe the creation of a corpus that supports a real-world hierarchical text categorization task in the domain of electronic rulemaking (eRulemaking). Features of the task and of the eRulemaking domain engender both a non-traditional text categorization corpus and a correspondingly difficult machine learning task. Interannotator agreement results are presented for a group of six annotators. We also briefly describe the results of experiments that apply standard and hierarchical text categorization techniques to the eRulemaking data sets. The corpus is the first in a series of related sentence-level text categorization corpora to be developed in the eRulemaking domain.

Better Inputs For Better Outcomes: Using The Interface To Improve E-Rulemaking, Cynthia R. Farina, Claire Cardie, Thomas R. Bruce, Erica Wagner

Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative Publications

We believe that e-rulemaking does indeed have potential to increase both the transparency of, and participation in, regulatory policymaking. We argue in this paper that this potential can be realized only if the public interface at www.regulations.gov is substantially redesigned.

Using Natural Language Processing To Improve Erulemaking [Project Highlight], Claire Cardie, Cynthia R. Farina, Thomas R. Bruce

Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative Publications

This paper describes in brief Cornell’s interdisciplinary eRulemaking project that was recently funded (December, 2005) by the National Science Foundation.