NLP to connect scientific knowledge with lawmaking in Chile

April 2023. How can the knowledge generated in universities and research centers be made available for the formation of laws in the country? This is the question behind the Vincula Meeting Platform, a 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 collaboration network, led by the Pontifical Catholic University and the University of Concepción. 

"Vincula is a social innovation that aims to ensure that the best and most diverse evidence and knowledge from science and research is used in the process of analyzing and creating laws in our country," explains Jazmine Maldonado, director of the IMFD Innovation area .

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

This is achieved with a web application that uses advanced language processing techniques to detect similarities between scientific research and other texts, which may be searches entered by users or documents from bills currently being processed. Based on public information available at universities, the system automatically creates anonymous profiles of experts. Academics who register on the platform will be able to use this information as a basis for creating their non-anonymized profiles. This information is validated and verified on a monthly basis, in line with the universities and study centers that are members of Vincula. 

Then, the application allows you to search for experts by entering a search phrase, which calculates a score for each academic profile. The first version of this algorithm is based on a BERT multilingual transformer model that allows text to be vectorized and the similarity between documents to be calculated. However, we are implementing a second version that uses the GPT3.5 model to analyze text and identify hierarchical areas of knowledge that facilitate comparison and allow much more intuitive profiles to be generated for users. This search system operates on all academic profiles created, whether they correspond to registered users or not. Therefore, when displaying the results on the platform, a color code and specific symbols are used to present profiles that are still anonymous. 

The platform also allows users to intuitively review bills that are currently being processed. To do so, it connects to the systems of the Chilean Senate and Chamber of Deputies, which provide up-to-date information on the status of the various bills being processed, as well as up-to-date information on the members of the committees that process each bill and their members. 

With regard to bills, the Vincula platform offers various features: it allows users to subscribe to bills of interest and receive email updates when they change status and move forward in the legislative process. This makes it easier for you to stay informed about the process and participate in a secure and timely manner, if you wish to do so. You can also see who is on the legislative committee that is processing each bill and contact the parliamentarians or their advisors via email. 

The search and recommendation system and the legislative alert system are two sides of the same coin. The former is demand-driven: it depends on the needs and preferences of those who require 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 timely and equitable participation by Chilean academics. Both work in sync and enable the project's ultimate goal to be achieved, which is that the best and most diverse research evidence and knowledge available informs the law-making process for the well-being of Chile and all its inhabitants," saysFrancisca Reyes, director of Vincula, academic at the Institute for Sustainable Development (IDS) at the Catholic University, and associate researcher at the CAPES Basal Center and the Millennium Institute Coastal Socio-Ecology, SECOS.

In addition to this, academics can provide documentation or report on their participation in committees where different bills are discussed, information that is available to other users of the application, both on the bill's page and on 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 promote the use of their knowledge in parliamentary discussions, as well as coordinating with universities' internal information systems for the validation and data extraction systems used by the platform," says Andrea Rodriguez-Tastet, Vice-Rector for Research and Development at the University of Concepción and researcher at the IMFD. 

After a six-month trial period the Vincula Platform began operating on a large scale in 2023, reaching a total of 412 users from six universities and Congress in April. "We hope that, during the second half of 2023, the Vincula Platform will have new features that will be the result of the research and development we continue to carry out, and that the integration of seven more universities will have been completed," highlights Jazmine Maldonado.

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

For more information, visit: https://vincula.cl/