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Training with Official Congressional Summaries?

#1
by arihers - opened

Hi All,
I work on modernization projects in Congress (see https://modernizecongress.house.gov/). This data set is an excellent baseline, and for the United States Congress, it is possible to gather officially summaries, written by the Congressional Research Service, for most bills at each stage (see, e.g. https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/350).

I am very interested in speaking with anyone who may want to work with or expand this data set, and may be interested in exploring the possibility of using ML to create draft summaries for new bills, which could be edited, corrected and expanded by legislative experts.

Ari

really cool, @arihers – I'll ping other people from our team to make sure they see this message

I am thinking about doing a very similar thing with Canadian law from our Parliament. I'd love to be included in the conversation.

Hi @julien-c , @davanstrien , @simonosgoode , @thomwolf , @jplu , @lewtun :

Our team, @BorodaUA, @alexbojko, created this dataset of U.S. bills and their professional summaries: https://huggingface.co/datasets/dreamproit/bill_summary_us
We limited the dataset to small bills (< 10 sections), and parsed both the XML and plain text. We would appreciate any interest in a) commenting on or refining the dataset, b) applying existing models, and c) training on the dataset to create a specialized model. We work with the experts at the Library of Congress who write summaries, and there is an exciting potential to develop prototypes to train and improve models with expert input. Please share with anyone you think would be interested!

@simonosgoode , we can work with you to do something similar for Canadian law.

Best,
Ari

Hi @arihers ,
I'm working on a similar project with the United States Code (USC) Title 26 (Internal Revenue). Do you know if summaries exist for the USC and what organization would produce such summaries?
Thanks,
Matt

Hi @mpickard ,
To my knowledge, there's no public summary of all of Title 26. Commercial services such as Lexis-Nexis and Thompson-Reuters have annotations that add context (not necessarily summaries), and there are many IRS guidance documents that are relevant.
See https://libguides.law.umn.edu/c.php?g=125796&p=823387
for a description of various sources of the US Code. I believe that the short answer is that there's no neat summary available by US Code section, that I'm aware of.

Thanks for the quick reply, @arihers .

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