Generating original structure in regulatory documents

  • Authors:
  • Steven O. Kimbrough;Thomas Y. Lee;Balaji Padmanabhan;Yinghui Yang

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA;University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA;University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA;University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA

  • Venue:
  • dg.o '03 Proceedings of the 2003 annual national conference on Digital government research
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

As technology and society continue to evolve, the size of the corpus of government policies and procedures continues to more than keep pace. The U.S. Federal Tax Code today consumes over 2.8 million words or 6000 pages. There are more than 20,000 cross-references both within the code itself and to external regulations. Navigating the sea of information is a daunting task for the IRS let alone a well-intentioned tax payer, or policy-maker seeking to eliminate redundancies, inconsistencies, or loopholes. While tools for tasks such as compliance checking or query answering have long held promise, automated reasoning, however intelligent, needs something to reason upon, a formalized knowledge base of some kind. In other domains people may be the primary targets of knowledge engineering; in the policy realm, much of the requisite knowledge resides in legal and regulatory documents.