research-article

A relatedness analysis of government regulations using domain knowledge and structural organization

Authors:

Gio WiederholdAuthors Info & Claims

Information Retrieval, Volume 9, Issue 6

Pages 657 - 680

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10791-006-9010-8

Published: 01 December 2006 Publication History

Abstract

The complexity and diversity of government regulations make understanding and retrieval of regulations a non-trivial task. One of the issues is the existence of multiple sources of regulations and interpretive guides with differences in format, terminology and context. This paper describes a comparative analysis scheme developed to help retrieval of related provisions from different regulatory documents. Specifically, the goal is to identify the most strongly related provisions between regulations. The relatedness analysis makes use of not only traditional term match but also a combination of feature matches, and not only content comparison but also structural analysis.

Regulations are first compared based on conceptual information as well as domain knowledge through feature matching. Regulations also possess specific organizational structures, such as a tree hierarchy of provisions and heavy referencing between provisions. These structures represent useful information in locating related provisions, and are therefore exploited in the comparison of regulations for completeness. System performance is evaluated by comparing a similarity ranking produced by users with the machine-predicted ranking. Ranking produced by the relatedness analysis system shows a reduction in error compared to that of Latent Semantic Indexing. Various pairs of regulations are compared and the results are analyzed along with observations based on different feature usages. An example of an e-rulemaking scenario is shown to demonstrate capabilities and limitations of the prototype relatedness analysis system.

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Index Terms

A relatedness analysis of government regulations using domain knowledge and structural organization

Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

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cover image Information Retrieval

Information Retrieval Volume 9, Issue 6

Dec 2006

121 pages

ISSN:1386-4564

Issue’s Table of Contents

© Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2006.

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Kluwer Academic Publishers

United States

Publication History

Published: 01 December 2006

Accepted: 17 January 2006

Received: 30 May 2005

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Cited By

Schulz MZhu K(2022)Learning by ConnectingOrganization Science10.1287/orsc.2021.152433:5(2018-2040)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1287/orsc.2021.1524
Monroy ACalvo HGelbukh AGarcía Pacheco G(2013)Link analysis for representing and retrieving legal informationProceedings of the 14th international conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing - Volume 210.1007/978-3-642-37256-8_32(380-393)Online publication date: 24-Mar-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-642-37256-8_32
Law KLau GFerriero DPardo TQian H(2012)REGNETProceedings of the 6th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance10.1145/2463728.2463764(175-183)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2463728.2463764
Ekstrom JLau GCharbonneau MDiamond LShulman SChun SJanssen MGil-Garcia J(2008)Exploratory text mining of ocean law to measure overlapping agency and jurisdictional authorityProceedings of the 2008 international conference on Digital government research10.5555/1367832.1367844(53-62)Online publication date: 18-May-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1367832.1367844
Hamou-Lhadj AHamou-Lhadj A(2007)Towards a compliance support framework for global software companiesProceedings of the 11th IASTED International Conference on Software Engineering and Applications10.5555/1647636.1647643(31-36)Online publication date: 6-Nov-2007
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Lau GWang HLaw KFortes JMacintosh A(2006)Locating related regulations using a comparative analysis approachProceedings of the 2006 international conference on Digital government research10.1145/1146598.1146662(229-238)Online publication date: 21-May-2006
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1146598.1146662

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