CIPPIC training AI to highlight patterns in regulatory, court docs

The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) is teaming up with an artificial intelligence platform that it hopes will produce insights, which would otherwise be missed, from a trove of telecom- and broadcast-related documents. Announced Tuesday, the partnership between CIPPIC and legal technology company vLex Canada will produce a tool that will help the public retrieve important information without having to dig for it and help them make more informed decisions when they come to participate in public consultations the CRTC holds when reviewing policy. CIPPIC will feed vLex’s Iceberg platform with data from thousands of pages of policy, CRTC and court submissions and other resources to mine data, which a blog post on vLex said would allow the public to have access to information on the same level as “armies of industry lawyers.” “The thesis is that in doing so we’ll craft a tool that allows us to glean insights and spot patterns from the submissions that we otherwise would not,” CIPPIC lawyer David Fewer said in an email. “That’s very useful because as a small public interest advocate, we just don’t have the human resources to undertake that kind of analysis.” The tool will essentially spot patterns and insights that can include “clusters of positions around certain issues that, when cross-referenced with industry position, might show trends or convergence, particularly when cross-referenced by type of participant,” Fewer said. “They might be useful as well in predicting positions and identifying future policy issues.” The team is currently building the tool, and is focusing on the over 2,000 submissions to the government-appointed panel reviewing the country’s communications laws. The panel released a report earlier this year that highlighted the submissions it received, and will release a final report with its recommendations in January. Fewer said the full release of the tool, which he said the team hopes to use on other policy areas including the copyright and privacy law reviews, is anticipated for the end of winter. It is being funded by the Law Foundation of Ontario.

CIPPIC training AI to highlight patterns in regulatory, court docs

Brief | December 10, 2019

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CIPPIC training AI to highlight patterns in regulatory, court docs

Brief | December 10, 2019

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