HADES: Homologous Automated Document Exploration and Summarization

This paper introduces HADES, a novel tool for automatic comparative documents with similar structures. HADES is designed to streamline the work of professionals dealing with large volumes of documents, such as policy documents, legal acts, and scientific papers. The tool employs a multi-step pipeline that begins with processing PDF documents using topic modeling, summarization, and analysis of the most important words for each topic. The process concludes with an interactive web app with visualizations that facilitate the comparison of the documents. HADES has the potential to significantly improve the productivity of professionals dealing with high volumes of documents, reducing the time and effort required to complete tasks related to comparative document analysis. Our package is publically available on GitHub.

Climate Policy Tracker: Pipeline for automated analysis of public climate policies

The number of standardized policy documents regarding climate policy and their publication frequency is significantly increasing. The documents are long and tedious for manual analysis, especially for policy experts, lawmakers, and citizens who lack access or domain expertise to utilize data analytics tools. Potential consequences of such a situation include reduced citizen governance and involvement in climate policies and an overall surge in analytics costs, rendering less accessibility for the public. In this work, we use a Latent Dirichlet Allocation-based pipeline for the automatic summarization and analysis of 10-years of national energy and climate plans (NECPs) for the period from 2021 to 2030, established by 27 Member States of the European Union. We focus on analyzing policy framing, the language used to describe specific issues, to detect essential nuances in the way governments frame their climate policies and achieve climate goals. The methods leverage topic modeling and clustering for the comparative analysis of policy documents across different countries. It allows for easier integration in potential user-friendly applications for the development of theories and processes of climate policy. This would further lead to better citizen governance and engagement over climate policies and public policy research.