OntoCop: Constructing Ontologies for Public Comments

Most proposed regulations attract few comments from the public, but each year a few regulations attract tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of comments.

Abstract

U.S. law defines a process known as Notice and Comment Rulemaking that requires regulatory agencies to seek comment from the public before establishing new regulations. Regulatory agencies are also expected to demonstrate that the final regulation addresses all substantive issues raised by the public. Most proposed regulations attract few comments from the public, but each year a few regulations attract tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of comments. When comment volume is high, most comments are form letters and modified form letters, which are not difficult to process [1], but there are still tens of thousands of unique comments that address a variety of issues. There may also be political or public pressure for the agency to issue regulations quickly. In these cases, regulatory agencies and other interested parties need tools that help them to quickly make sense of public comments. Browsing hierarchies such as the Yahoo! Directory are a popular method of quickly discovering the “lay of the land ” in a large text corpus. By associating documents with topics and concepts in a hierarchy, the information space is structured and partitioned into smaller spaces that are easy to understand and navigate. Regulation-specific browsing hierarchies makes it easier to understand the range of issues that were raised by the public, and enables “drilling down ” into comments that discuss particular issues, which enables agencies and policymakers to be more responsive to the public’s concerns. Information analysis tools that enable comments to be analyzed quickly and efficiently also increase the likelihood that agency staff will process public comments within the agency, rather than