NLP to connect scientific knowledge with law-making in Chile

April, 2023 - How to make the knowledge generated in universities and study centers available for the formation of law in the country? This is the question behind the Vincula Meeting Platforma technological product developed by the IMFD Innovation team, as part of the collaboration between the Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data (IMFD) and the Vincula collaborative network, led by the Pontificia Universidad Católica and the Universidad de Concepción.

"Vincula is a social innovation, which aims for the best and most diverse evidence and knowledge coming from science and research to be used in the process of analysis and creation of laws in our country," explains Jazmine Maldonado, director of the IMFD Innovation area.

Technically, the platform is integrated with universities, which make available information on scientific publications produced in the country. Actors in the legislative system who need, for example, the vision of experts in certain subjects, can search this platform for academics whose work can enrich the debate or nurture the process of creating a law.

This is achieved with a web application that allows, through the use of advanced language processing techniques, to detect similarities between scientific research and other texts, which can be searches entered by users or documents of bills that are in process. Based on publicly available information from universities, the system automatically creates anonymous profiles of experts. automatically creates anonymous profiles of male and female experts.. Academics who register on the platform can use this information as a basis for the creation of their own non-anonymized profiles. non-anonymized profiles. This information is validated and verified on a monthly basis, online with Vincula's member universities and study centers.

Then, the application application allows you to search for experts by entering a search phrase, which calculates a score for each academic profile.which calculates a score for each academic profile. The first version of this algorithm is based on a multilanguage BERT transformer model that allows to vectorize the text and calculate the similarity between documents. However, we are implementing a second version that uses the GPT3.5 model to analyze the text and identifies hierarchical knowledge areas that facilitate the comparison and allow us to generate much more intuitive profiles for users. This search system operates on all academic profiles created, whether they correspond to registered or unregistered users. Therefore, when displaying the results on the platform, a specific color code and symbology is used to present the profiles that are still anonymous.

The platform also allows for an intuitive review of bills in the pipeline, connecting to systems of the Chilean Senate and Chamber of Deputies It connects to the systems of the Chilean Senate and Chamber of Deputies, which provide updated information on the status of the different bills being processed, as well as updated information on the members of the committees that are processing each bill and their members.

In relation to bills, the Vincula platform offers different functionalities: it allows you to subscribe to the bills of your interest. subscribe to the bills of interest to you and receive e-mail updates and receive email updates when they change status and advance in their processing. This makes it easier for them to stay informed of the process and to participate in the process in a safe and timely manner, if they wish to do so. They will also be able to see who is in the legislative committee where each bill is being processed and contact the parliamentarians or their advisors via e-mail.

"The search and recommendation system and the legislative alert are two sides of the same coin. The first is demand-driven: it depends on the needs and preferences of those who need the knowledge produced in our universities to better understand a topic under discussion, review available options, or assess its impact or relevance. However, it is the Legislative Alert system that completes the Vincula system by making visible and available the window of opportunity for a timely and equitable participation of Chilean academics. Both work in synchrony and allow achieving the ultimate goal of the project, which is that the best and most diverse research evidence and knowledge available inform the process of law formation for the welfare of Chile and all its inhabitants", saysFrancisca Reyes, director of Vincula, academic of the Institute for Sustainable Development (IDS) of the Catholic University and researcher associated with the CAPES Basal Center and the Millennium Institute for Coastal Socio-Ecology, SECOS.

In addition to this, academics can provide documentation or report on their can provide documentation or report on their participation in commissions where the different bills are being discussed.This information is available to other users of the application, both on the page of the bill and in their profile.

"Vincula reflects the collaborative effort of universities to ensure that knowledge can be used in public policy. It involves motivating and training academics to be promoters of the use of their knowledge in the parliamentary discussion and, in addition, an effort of articulation with the universities' internal information systems for the validation and data extraction systems used by the platform," says Andrea Rodriguez-Tastet, Vice Rector of Research and Development at the Universidad de Concepción and IMFD researcher. 

After a 6-month white march the Vincula Platform began to operate massively in 2023, reaching, in April, a total of 412 users from six universities and Congress. "We expect that, during the second semester of 2023, the Vincula Platform will have new functionalities new functionalities that will be the result of the research and development that we are continuing to and the integration of seven more universities will be completed," emphasizes Jazmine Maldonado.

For Marcelo Arenas, an academic at the Catholic University of Chile and director of the IMFD, "the interdisciplinary research, carried out jointly by academics from computer science and social sciences, has been a great success.The interdisciplinary research, carried out jointly by academics from computer science and social sciences, has been very important for the development of the Vincula project, since it has allowed the integration of different approaches and perspectives for the solution of problems.has been very important for the development of the Vincula project, as it has allowed the integration of different approaches and perspectives for the solution of complex problems". He adds that the collaboration between experts in data science, natural language processing and political science "has allowed the creation of an efficient and accessible platform, which can collect, organize, integrate and relate data on academics and their research with data from the legislative arena".

For more information, go to: https://vincula.cl/