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Bardess Senior Data Scientist Serena Peruzzo will be a featured speaker at this year’s Strange Loop conference Sept. 12-14 at the Stifel Theatre in St. Louis, MO.

Peruzzo will be speaking about the work done with the government of Ontario investigating how Natural Language Processing (NLP) can simplify legislative texts and reduce burdens on those most impacted.

From the site:

The process of legal reasoning is heavily reliant on information stored in text, but while legal texts are generally easily accessible, their interpretation often isn’t straight forward, making the understanding of the law effectively inaccessible to the general public.

Data Scientists from Bardess, in collaboration with a research group from the Government of Ontario, have investigated how Natural Language Processing techniques can be applied to understand linguistic patterns in legislative texts and extract information that is meaningful for the public.

Using the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) as a test case, we developed a multi-stage analysis that combines some well known NLP methodologies in a unique approach. Ultimately we were able to automate the extraction of rules from the Act and its Regulation, identify the entities responsible for compliance, and organize them into groups that are homogeneous with respect to their impact on various entities and industries.

The methodology developed provides us with a framework for representing legal texts that can be used to simplify the way information in the law is accessed by the public and at the same time highlights parts of the law that are particularly hard to interpret and should be re-written more clearly.

Peruzzo will speak at 2:30 p.m. in the ST Centene room on Friday, Sept. 13.

To register for the Strange Loop conference, click here.

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