i.AI Consultation Analyser


New Tool by AI.Gov.UK: “Public consultations are a critical part of the process of making laws, but analysing consultation responses is complex and very time consuming. Working with the No10 data science team (10DS), the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (i.AI) is developing a tool to make the process of analysing public responses to government consultations faster and fairer.

The Analyser uses AI and data science techniques to automatically extract patterns and themes from the responses, and turns them into dashboards for policy makers.

The goal is for computers to do what they are best at: finding patterns and analysing large amounts of data. That means humans are free to do the work of understanding those patterns.

Screenshot showing donut chart for those who agree or disagree, and a bar chart showing popularity of prevalent themes

Government runs 700-800 consultations a year on matters of importance to the public. Some are very small, but a large consultation might attract hundreds of thousands of written responses.

A consultation attracting 30,000 responses requires a team of around 25 analysts for 3 months to analyse the data and write the report. And it’s not unheard of to get double that number

If we can apply automation in a way that is fair, effective and accountable, we could save most of that £80m…(More)”