Case Study - Text Analysis Program

The Challenge - The Congressional agencies are swamped with an ever increasing legislative work load. Bills are often a combination of prior bills with obscure changes. Legislative Analysts often struggle to identify common sections of bills, track provisions reintroduced many times, and document their differences. This analysis is often an urgent, manual, time-consuming process involving thousands of pages of text that can have major impacts.

The Solution - The Text Analysis Program (TAP) was developed to help Legislative Analysts quickly identify similarities and differences across new and prior legislation. TAP quickly finds complex legislative texts, identifies similar legislation, and highlights the differences. TAP also tracks provisions across bills, back to the 103rd congress.

As one TAP user said,"Your work will never be the same; it is that powerful."

The following four images provide an introduction to TAP, from its Search through the Bill Comparator (or Click Here to see TAP in action):

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The results of searching for “improving math”.

Finding similar documents from a bill.

Selecting a similar document to compare.

Comparing the two documents, side-by-side.

TAP was developed by Rich Greenfield (Product Champion) and Dean Wilder (System Architect). Their profound knowledge of legislative processes led to the development of TAP's many powerful features. TAP uses the Microsoft .NET’s Model-View-Controller architecture and A.J. Boggs' PISCES search engine.

 TAP offers:

• Similarity searches
• Side-by-side document comparisons
• Advanced searching of provisions and bill text
• Provision tracking

The Results

• TAP saves time and improves analysis
• Offers side-by-side views of complex/co-mingled documents
• Identifies legislative text from prior bills
• Improves efficiency (saved $5M+ over 8 years)