NOMAD: Linguistic Resources and Tools Aimed at Policy Formulation and Validation

AbstractThe NOMAD project (Policy Formulation and Validation through non Moderated Crowd-sourcing) is a project that supports policy making, by providing rich, actionable information related to how citizens perceive different policies. NOMAD automatically analyzes citizen contributions to the informal web (e.g. forums, social networks, blogs, newsgroups and wikis) using a variety of tools. These tools comprise text retrieval, topic classification, argument detection and sentiment analysis, as well as argument summarization. NOMAD provides decision-makers with a full arsenal of solutions starting from describing a domain and a policy to applying content search and acquisition, categorization and visualization. These solutions work in a collaborative manner in the policy-making arena. NOMAD, thus, embeds editing, analysis and visualization technologies into a concrete framework, applicable in a variety of policy-making and decision support settings In this paper we provide an overview of the linguistic tools and resources of NOMAD.