Home
About
Contact
Publications
CMU Testbed
QDAP-UMass
NCDG
dg. 2009

News: The US Small Business Administration adopts DiscoverText for sorting comments on proposed rules.
New Software: The latest offering is DiscoverText featuring the Twitter and Facebook Graph APIs. Try it free today!

USDA, FCC & USFWS Adopt UMass eRulemaking Software: The Public Comment Analysis Toolkit (PCAT) is in use as USDA-CAT, FCC-CAT,  and FWS-CAT.

New Videos: Download a brief video demonstrating the DURIAN solution for mass email campaigns (.avi version)[24 MB] or (iPhone version) [7MB] or  download a second video demonstrating the Coding Analysis Toolkit solution for sorting public comments (.avi version) [62MB] or (iPhone version) [18 MB].
Tools-for-Rules: Use our Tools-for-Rules to review the 271,324 e-mailed public comments received by the US Fish & Wildlife Service on "Designating the Northern Rocky Mountain Population of Gray Wolf as a Distinct Population Segment and Removing This Distinct Population Segment From the Federal List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife".
In the News: "Algorithmically Yours" - Science & "Constituents' E-Mail..." - Washington Post.
On the Airwaves: An extended interview on WGDR about mass e-mail campaigns.
Recent Publication: "Democracy and E-Rulemaking," Schlosberg, Zavestoski & Shulman
dg.o 2008: "Ontology Collection for Large E-mail Collections," Yang & Callan.
dg.o 2007: "Identifying and Classifying Subjective Claims," Kwon et al., "A Bootstrapping Approach for Identifying Stakeholders in Public-Comment Corpora," Arguello & Callan.
dg.o 2006: "Multidimensional Text Analysis for eRulemaking," Kwon, Shulman & Hovy, "Next Steps in Near Duplicate Detection for eRulemaking," Yang, Callan & Shulman.
dg.o 2006 Whitepaper Collection: A collection of White Papers produced for a workshop on "eRulemaking at the Crossroads" at  dg.o 2006.
Stakeholder Report (2004): "The Internet Still Might (but Probably Won't) Change Everything," prepared based on three days of focus groups with a wide range of public and private participants in US federal rulemaking.
Just for Fun: Check out a 'Wordle' visualization based on public comments about the polar bears.

This research project was initiated during the fall 1999 semester and the content on this website was made possible with the following grants from the National Science Foundation: III-0705566 "Collaborative Research III-COR: From a Pile of Documents to a Collection of Information: A Framework for Multi-Dimensional Text Analysis," IIS-0429293 "Collaborative Research: Language Processing Technology for Electronic Rulemaking,"  EIA-00328914 "SGER COLLABORATIVE: A Testbed for eRulemaking Data," SES-0322662 "Democracy and E-Rulemaking: Comparing Traditional vs. Electronic Comment from a Discursive Democratic Framework," and EIA-0089892 "SGER: Citizen Agenda-Setting in the Regulatory Process: Electronic Collection and Synthesis of Public Commentary." We are also grateful for financial support from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.  Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the National Science Foundation.