An Information Infrastructure for Government Regulations

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 which are often independent of governing bodies. In this work, we propose an information infrastructure for regulation management and analysis, which includes a document repository and tools for similarity analysis and compliance assistance. Our corpus currently includes accessibility and environmental regulations, as well as selective supplementary documents from the Federal government and private organizations. A shallow parser is developed to consolidate different regulations into a unified XML format, which is well suited for handling semi-structured data such as legal documents. Important features, such as concepts, measurements, definitions and so on, are extracted and incorporated into the corpus by using handcrafted rules and text mining tools. Information Retrieval (IR) techniques are employed to compare and locate similar or related provisions in different regulatory documents. Structural and referential information from regulations are used to further refine the similarity analysis. Compliance check is performed using a reasoning tool based on First Order Predicate Calculus (FOPC) logic. The compliance assistance system guides users through provisions using a question and answer interface. Examples of an e-rulemaking scenario for a rights-of-way draft and a compliance check procedure with a used oil regulation are shown to demonstrate current capabilities of the prototype system.