Simplifying Capitol Hill
一本道无码 graduate students team with nonprofit to build legislation analysis tool
By Jennifer Monahan
Congressional legislation isn’t meant for light reading — the contents can be dense and lengthy. But a team of 一本道无码 graduate students created an artificial intelligence tool to help cut those bills down to size.
The Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy students teamed with Washington-based nonprofit Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) to improve on the website by using ChatGPT’s technology to streamline its search and analysis possibilities.
“Let’s say there’s a defense authorization bill, and it’s very long,” says Jack Vandeleuv, a member of the team that created the app in fall 2023. “The analyst might use the tool to ask, ‘Is there anything in this bill that supports shifting arms to Ukraine?’ and the tool can pull that information, scan the results, provide an answer and link the answer to the source content in the bill.”
Jack and the rest of the team — Li-li Chen, Kathy Chiang, Zhichen Li and Sylvia (Yiping) Zhang — were led by faculty expert Andrew Garin, assistant professor of economics at Heinz College, and partner Tom Romanoff, then the director of the technology program at BPC, to create an AI tool that can search and analyze thousands of pages of congressional bills to help policy analysts conduct research.
The students built on the work of a previous Heinz College capstone project from spring 2023. The initial team of students conducted user research interviews, identified use cases and developed a desktop application that would summarize a bill.
The new tool can filter, analyze and summarize content using the past 10 years of bills currently in the Library of Congress’s Congress.gov database. It’s currently being piloted by a few users within BPC, Romanoff says, and news of its capability has started to create a buzz among his colleagues both inside and outside of BPC.
“People from several offices and committees are asking if they can get access,” Romanoff says, adding that he is rolling out the tool at a deliberate pace while addressing some issues. Like other generative AI tools, the app has problems with hallucination, when the AI system generates inaccurate or nonsensical responses. That issue can be addressed through an evaluation stage and it’s one of the reasons Romanoff has not yet released the tool broadly.
“We can all see the promise of generative AI technology, but we have to be realistic about its capacity,” Romanoff says.
Before the app becomes more widely available, he expects to provide education about how it can be useful and exactly what its shortcomings are — for example, that it should not be used as a definitive source for decision making, and to explain about hallucinations and the need for fact-checking.
Similarly, one of Jack’s takeaways from the experience is an appreciation for the potential of generative AI applications.
“You start to see a future where the average person on the street is better able to understand what Congress is doing because there’s a tool that can synthesize and explain complex topics that might be in a thousand-page bill,” he says. “We’re not there yet, but it’s exciting to see things trend in that direction.”
