Here's a thought (an old one)
It's not a blog if you don't link, so here is Pandagon, noting that it would be helpful if there were some sort of mechanism to translate legislative language into English, for more comprehensible public consumption.
A similar thought occurred to me a while back, and I spent some time looking into automated processes that might convert convoluted legalese into a grammar tree. It turns out to be not only harder than it sounds, but much harder.
Whether you call it Human Language Technologies, or Natural Language Processing, it has proven to be an intractable problem in automation. While it would be nice to toss 1300 pages of omnibus spending bill into the hopper and have a credible analysis spit out the faucet, that level of performance is a way off. But wouldn't it be nice to at least be presented with a simplified English version, something that, say, removed all the double and triple negatives, placing them into a straightforward sentence that is more easily understood -- by humans at least, if not machines?
Something to think about. Some more.
A similar thought occurred to me a while back, and I spent some time looking into automated processes that might convert convoluted legalese into a grammar tree. It turns out to be not only harder than it sounds, but much harder.
Whether you call it Human Language Technologies, or Natural Language Processing, it has proven to be an intractable problem in automation. While it would be nice to toss 1300 pages of omnibus spending bill into the hopper and have a credible analysis spit out the faucet, that level of performance is a way off. But wouldn't it be nice to at least be presented with a simplified English version, something that, say, removed all the double and triple negatives, placing them into a straightforward sentence that is more easily understood -- by humans at least, if not machines?
Something to think about. Some more.
posted by ChipA at 5:19 PM
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