This workshop will demonstrate the use of text analytics, machine-learning, and data visualization to assist in the analysis of national policy documents.

In recent years, the reduction of the cost of processing power, the increased availability of text data in electronic formats (e.g. from websites, and electronic libraries), and the popularization of machine-learning techniques have expanded the use of advanced text analytics techniques in the private sector. For example, large Internet companies such as search engines, e-commerce, and social networks, use text analytics techniques to classify and cluster text according to their needs, for example by topic, language, similarity, sentiment, among others.

Advanced text analytics techniques have also been applied frequently in the counter-terrorism and intelligence sectors to monitor communications through a variety of formats such as text, voice and video. However, there are fewer examples of applications of text analytics on policy research. 

In this workshop, the speakers will detail a scenario in which various text analytics techniques have been applied to a collection of national cybersecurity policies with the objective of enhancing and expediting the work of human researchers. This is achieved by extracting text from the original publications, categorizing the sentences inside each document into topics of interests, discovering keywords, and making the documents searchable though a human-friendly interface.

The application that will be demonstrated in the workshop does not claim to perform a more thorough or comprehensive analysis than the one conducted by a human researcher, instead it aims to enhance the capacity of the researcher to understand and assimilate documents, by providing them a preliminary analysis and classification of text, as well as search tools with graphical representations of the meaning.

The tool presented was conceived and developed in collaboration between Fordham University (New York, USA), New York University (New York, USA), the ICT Applications and Cybersecurity Division of the International Telecommunications Union (Geneva, Switzerland), and the Analytics, Partnerships & Innovation of the United Nations Office of Information and Communications Technology (New York, USA).