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.

The complexity and diversity of government regulations make understanding the regulations a non-trivial task. One of the issues is the existence of multiple sources of regulations and interpretive guides. In this work, we propose an information infrastructure for regulation analysis, which includes a document repository and tools for compliance assistance and similarity analysis. A regulatory repository is developed based on an XML format, and important features, such as concepts and measurements, are extracted using handcrafted rules and a text mining tool. Our framework provides compliance assistance using a reasoning tool based on First Order Predicate Calculus logic, where users are alerted of detected conflicts or otherwise compliance with the regulation. A relatedness analysis is performed by comparing the extracted features as well as structural and referential information from regulations. Examples of an electronic-rulemaking scenario and a compliance checking procedure are shown to demonstrate current capabilities of the prototype system.

The process of e-rulemaking with participation from the public involves a non-trivial task of sorting through and organizing a massive volume of electronically submitted comments. This research proposes to make use of available Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to help describe the relationship of public comments to policy drafts and deliberations. Based on previous work on regulatory management and comparisons, a relatedness analysis tool has been prototyped and applied to compare drafted regulations with the associated public comments. An example using a drafted regulation on rights-ofway access and the comments received by the Access Board is employed to illustrate the prototyped analysis tool. The drafted regulation and public comments are compared using not only a traditional term match but also a combination of feature matches, and not only content comparison but also structural analysis. This comparison framework helps review of comments with respect to provisions in the draft. Examples of results are shown to illustrate the use and limitations of ICT to support policy making.

This paper describes a research project that addresses the difficulties in dealing with regulatory documents such as national and regional codes. These documents tend to be voluminous, heavily cross-referenced, possibly ambiguous and even conflicting at times. There are often multiple documents that need to be consulted and satisfied; however it is a difficult task to locate all of the relevant provisions. In addition, sections dealing with the same or similar conceptual ideas sometimes lay down conflicting requirements. We propose a framework for regulation representation, analysis and comparison with emphasis on the extraction of similarities between provisions. We focus on accessibility regulations, whose intent is to provide the same or equivalent access to a building and its facilities for disabled persons. An XML regulatory repository is developed to extract structural as well as non-structural features from government regulations to help user understanding and computational analysis. A similarity analysis is performed between different sources of regulations. In order to achieve a better comparison between provisions, we employ a combination of feature matching and structural analysis. Results are shown on comparisons between American and European codes, as well as on the domain of electronic-rulemaking. 1