Inferring missing metadata from environmental policy texts

Abstract

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) provides a trove of data on how environmental policy decisions have been made in the United States over the last 50 years. Unfortunately, there is no central database for this information and it is too voluminous to assess manually. We describe our efforts to enable systematic research over US environmental policy by extracting and organizing metadata from the text of NEPA documents. Our contributions include collecting more than 40,000 NEPA-related documents, and evaluating rule-based baselines that establish the difficulty of three important tasks: identifying lead agencies, aligning document versions, and detecting reused text.

Addressing structural hurdles for metadata extraction from environmental impact statements

“…The NEPAccess platform is designed to overcome these limitations. To make it possible, we perform large‐scale web‐crawling to collect all NEPA documents available online and retrieve as much associated metadata as possible (Bethard et al, 2019). For those cases where pieces of metadata are missing, we develop machine learning models to automatically extract that information from the text.…”