Providing More Efficient Access To Government Records: A Use Case Involving Application of Machine Learning to Improve FOIA Review for the Deliberative Process Privilege
At present, the review process for material that is exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in the United States of America, and under many similar government transparency regimes worldwide, is entirely manual. Public access to the records of their government is thus inhibited by the long backlogs of material awaiting such reviews. This paper studies one aspect of that problem by first creating a new public test collection with annotations for one class of exempt material, the deliberative process privilege, and then by using that test collection to study the ability of current text classification techniques to identify those materials that are exempt from release under that privilege. Results show that when the system is trained and evaluated using annotations from the same reviewer that even difficult cases can often be reliably detected, but that differences in reviewer interpretations, differences in record custodians, and that differences in topics of the records used for training and testing pose additional challenges.
Code (1)
Tasks
text-classificationText ClassificationSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Trusted Data Forever: Is AI the Answer?
Archival institutions and programs worldwide work to ensure that the records of governments, organizations, communities, and individuals are preserved for future generations as cultural heritage, as sources of rights, an…
ManagementVisualizing changes to US federal environmental agency websites, 2016–2020
Websites have become the primary means by which the US federal government communicates about its operations and presents information for public consumption. However, the alteration or removal of critical information from…
Data VisualizationPredicting the Past: Estimating Historical Appraisals with OCR and Machine Learning
Despite well-documented consequences of the U.S. government's 1930s housing policies on racial wealth disparities, scholars have struggled to quantify its precise financial effects due to the inaccessibility of historica…
Optical Character Recognition (OCR)A Semantic Framework for Enabling Radio Spectrum Policy Management and Evaluation
Because radio spectrum is a finite resource, its usage and sharing is regulated by government agencies. These agencies define policies to manage spectrum allocation and assignment across multiple organizations, systems, …
ManagementModeling "Newsworthiness" for Lead-Generation Across Corpora
Journalists obtain "leads", or story ideas, by reading large corpora of government records: court cases, proposed bills, etc. However, only a small percentage of such records are interesting documents. We propose a model…
Articles