Using Machine Learning techniques to improve how we manage public consultations responses

Speaker: Kerry Granger, Senior Data Scientist at Ofcom

Abstract

As a regulator Ofcom undertakes frequent public consultations - preparing for our new role in regulating Online Safety will require even more consultations, which will involve analysing large numbers of documents.

Hence, we are currently developing methods to utilise various Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing techniques to not only automate and streamline these processes, but also gain deeper insight into the content of these documents.

We have produced an end-to-end process that starts by parsing and cleaning consultation responses. We then use data science to explore and interrogate the data, and then present everything to the user in a single, user-friendly tool, that also links back to the original documents.

This process not only saves time and reduces errors from manual operations, but also allows policy makers to easily digest and gain additional understanding of the content of the files, thus contributing to fulfilling our data strategy of making data more accessible to all colleagues.

About the speaker

Kerry Granger, Senior Data Scientist. Kerry is a senior data scientist at Ofcom, the UK’s communication regulator.

She is part of the Online Safety Machine Learning team which is a team of ML experts who provide solutions for Online Safety colleagues.

Kerry has a mathematics degree and master’s degree along with 10 years industry experience working in data science.