Financial System Inquiry topical analysis

Abstract

Summary This research paper describes the merit of developing a text analytics engine to index public submissions to the recent Financial System Inquiry (FSI). Public inquiries such as the FSI typically involve processing a substantial number of documents, with content that represents a diverse range of opinions. Managing the diverse authorship and viewpoints reflected in a body of submissions presents a unique challenge. This research demonstrates the use of automated topic analysis to enhance the productivity of panel members who are responsible for reading and analysing a large body of submission material. The result is a heat-map of topic exposure by submissions. Description Public policy development is often conducted via the process of a Public Inquiry involving the statement of a Terms of Reference, appointment of an Expert Panel and call for submissions from interested organisations and members of the public. The public input to a typical inquiry involves substantial textual content reflecting the diverse opinions of contributors. Managing large inventories of publicly submitted documents with diverse authorship and competing viewpoints is a challenging problem area. In this working paper, we describe research efforts to develop a proof-of-concept text analytics engine to assist topical indexing of a large corpus of public submissions to the recent Australian Financial Systems Inquiry (FSI). The methodology was based on topical analysis of the documents using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) as implemented within open source software based on the Python gensim package. This report details how the proof-of-concept text analytics pipeline was assembled and summarizes some of the key topic patterns of submissions by identified author affinity groups. Through use of the textual commentary of the Expert Panel during the course of the Inquiry, the topic analysis is constrained to focus on those matters deemed most relevant to their editorial input. Using this approach provides a means to introduce an “editorial prior” incorporating the stated views of the Expert Panel on their Interim Observations and their Final Recommendations. It is hoped that such methods might provide a means to sharpen understanding of the conversation expressed through the process of public submissions, commentary and second-round consultations.