Interpretation of Natural Language Rules in Conversational Machine Reading

Most work in machine reading focuses on question answering problems where the answer is directly expressed in the text to read. However, many real-world question answering problems require the reading of text not because it contains the literal answer, but because it contains a recipe to derive an answer together with the reader's background knowledge. One example is the task of interpreting regulations to answer "Can I...?" or "Do I have to...?" questions such as "I am working in Canada. Do I have to carry on paying UK National Insurance?" after reading a UK government website about this topic. This task requires both the interpretation of rules and the application of background knowledge. It is further complicated due to the fact that, in practice, most questions are underspecified, and a human assistant will regularly have to ask clarification questions such as "How long have you been working abroad?" when the answer cannot be directly derived from the question and text. In this paper, we formalise this task and develop a crowd-sourcing strategy to collect 32k task instances based on real-world rules and crowd-generated questions and scenarios. We analyse the challenges of this task and assess its difficulty by evaluating the performance of rule-based and machine-learning baselines. We observe promising results when no background knowledge is necessary, and substantial room for improvement whenever background knowledge is needed.Comment: EMNLP 201

Local authority handling of Freedom of Information requests: lessons from a research project

The purpose of this article is to report on early findings from a wide scale research project which relies on the effectiveness freedom of information provisions in order to obtain data. If freedom of information legislation does not function to ensure disclosures by public authorities, the research data necessary for the research would either not be available or would be much more difficult to obtain. In making FOIA requests, the authors hope to map the use of whistleblowing disclosures within a complex regulatory landscape, involving both local authorities and national regulators

Planning for Excellence: Insights from an International Review of Regulators’ Strategic Plans

What constitutes regulatory excellence? Answering this question is an indispensable first step for any public regulatory agency that is measuring, striving towards, and, ultimately, achieving excellence. One useful way to answer this question would be to draw on the broader literature on regulatory design, enforcement, and management. But, perhaps a more authentic way would be to look at how regulators themselves define excellence. However, we actually know remarkably little about how the regulatory officials who are immersed in the task of regulation conceive of their own success. In this Article, we investigate regulators’ definitions of regulatory excellence by drawing on a unique source of data that provides an important window on regulators’ own aspirations: their strategic plans. Strategic plans have been required or voluntarily undertaken for the past decade or longer by regulators around the globe. In these plans, regulators offer mission statements, strategic goals, and measurable and achievable outcomes, all of which indicate what regulators value and are striving to become. Occasionally, they even state explicitly where they have fallen short of “best-in-class” status and how they intend to improve. To date, a voluminous literature exists examining agency practices in strategic planning, but we are aware of no study that tries to glean from the substance of a sizeable number of plans how regulators themselves construe regulatory excellence. The main task of this Article is undertaking this effort. This Article draws on twenty plans from different regulators in nine countries. We found most generally that excellent regulators describe themselves (though not necessarily using exactly these words) as institutions that are more (1) efficient, (2) educative, (3) multiplicative, (4) proportional, (5) vital, (6) just, and (7) honest. In addition to these seven shared attribute categories, our reading of the plans also revealed five other “unusual” attributes that only one or two agencies mentioned. Beyond merely cataloguing the attributes identified by agencies, this Article also discusses commonalities (and differences) between plan structures, emphases, and framings. We found that the plans differed widely in features such as the specificity of their mission statements, the extent to which they emphasized actions over outcomes (or vice versa), and the extent to which commitments were organized along organizational fiefdoms or cut across bureaucratic lines. We urge future scholarship to explore alternative methods of text mining, and to study strategic plans over time within agencies, in order to track how agencies’ notions of regulatory excellence respond to changes in the regulatory context and the larger circumstances within which agencies operate. Looking longitudinally will also shed light on how agencies handle strategic goals that are either met or that prove to be unattainable

Governance of the London 2012 Olympic Games legacy

© The Author(s) 2011. This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below.This study addresses the governance of the London 2012 Olympics legacy. It presents legacy not as a retrospective but a prospective concept concerned with shaping the future through interactions between the state, market and society. This entails designing systems of governance to guide and steer collective actions towards a consensus amongst various parties concerned. Four modes of governance and a range of policy instruments were examined in the delivery of sustainable London Olympics sport legacy including coercive, voluntarism, targeting and framework regulation. The British government actively created a new policy space and promoted institutional conduct consistent with its legacy visions. The current global legacy framework is lacking the governance dimension and its logic needs to be reconsidered. A meaningful sport legacy requires not top-down approaches but locally informed strategies supported by a developmental design of the Olympic Games informed by sustainable principles

Report of IRPA task group on the impact of the eye lens dose limits

In 2012 IRPA established a task group (TG) to identify key issues in the implementation of the revised eye lens dose limit. The TG reported its conclusions in 2013. In January 2015, IRPA asked the TG to review progress with the implementation of the recommendations from the early report and to collate current practitioner experience. This report presents the results of a survey on the view of the IRPA professionals on the new limit to the lens of the eye and on the wider issue of tissue reactions. Recommendations derived from the survey are presented. This report was approved by IRPA Executive Council on 31 January 2017

Study supporting the interim evaluation of the innovation principle. Final Report November 2019

The European Commission has recognised the importance of a more innovation- oriented EU acquis, gradually exploring the ways in which EU rules can support innovation. The ‘innovation principle’ was introduced to ensure that whenever policy is developed, the impact on innovation is fully assessed. However, as further discussed in this Study, the exact contours of the innovation principle have been shaped very gradually within the context of the EU better regulation agenda: originally advocated by industry in the context of the precautionary principle, the innovation principle has gradually been given a more articulate and consistent role, which aims at complementing the precautionary principle by increasing the salience of impacts on innovation during all phases of the policy cycle. This Study presents an evaluation of the current implementation of the innovation principle, limited to two of its three components, i.e. the Research and Innovation Tool included in the Better Regulation Toolbox, and the innovation deals. As a preliminary caveat, it is important to recall that the implementation of the innovation principle is still in its infancy, and thus the Study only represents a very early assessment of the extent to which the innovation principle is being correctly implemented, and whether changes would be required to make the principle more effective and useful in the context of the EU better regulation agenda. The main finding is that the innovation principle has the potential to contribute to the quality and future-proof nature of EU policy, but that significant changes and effort will be needed for this potential to fully materialise. The most evident areas for improvement are related to the lack of a clear legal basis, the lack of a widely acknowledged definition, the lack of awareness among EU officials and stakeholders, and the lack of adequate skills among those that are called to implement the innovation principle. As a result of these problems, the impact of the innovation principle on the innovation-friendliness of the EU acquis has been limited so far. The Commission should clarify in official documents that the Innovation principle does not entail a de- regulatory approach, and is not incompatible with the precautionary principle: this would also help to have the principle fully recognised and endorsed by all EU institutions, as well as by civil society, often concerned with the possible anti-regulatory narrative around the innovation principle in stakeholder discussions. Apart from clarifications, and further dissemination and training, major improvements are possible in the near future, especially if the innovation principle is brought fully in line with the evolving data-driven nature of digital innovation and provides more guidance to the Commission on how to design experimental regulation, including inter alia so-called ‘regulatory sandboxes’. Finally, the Commission should ensure that the innovation principle is given prominence with the transition to the Horizon Europe programme, in particular due to the anticipated launch of ‘missions’ in key domains

Pre-empting protectionism in services - the WTO and outsourcing

Cross-border trade in services is growing rapidly, with both industrial and developing countries among the most dynamic exporters. Despite the substantial global benefits from such trade, the adjustment pressures created in importing countries could provoke a protectionist backlash-some signs of which are already visible in procurement and regulatory restrictions. The current negotiations under the Doha Development Agenda offer an opportunity to lock in current openness and preempt protectionism. This paper describes how a bold initiative under the General Agreement on Trade in Services can help secure openness.Decentralization,Enterprise Development&Reform,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,ICT Policy and Strategies,Banks&Banking Reform,ICT Policy and Strategies,Banks&Banking Reform,Governance Indicators,Health Economics&Finance,Knowledge Economy

Special Libraries, December 1948

Volume 39, Issue 10https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1948/1009/thumbnail.jp