RegBR: A novel Brazilian government framework to classify and analyze industry-specific regulations

Government transparency and openness are key factors to bring forth the modernization of the state. The combination of transparency and digital information has given rise to the concept of Open Government, that increases citizen understanding and monitoring of government actions, which in turn improves the quality of public services and of the government decision making process. With the goal of improving legislative transparency and the understanding of the Brazilian regulatory process and its characteristics, this paper introduces RegBR, the first national framework to centralize, classify and analyze regulations from the Brazilian government. A centralized database of Brazilian federal legislation built from automated ETL routines and processed with data mining and machine learning techniques was created. Our framework evaluates different NLP models in a text classification task on our novel Portuguese legal corpus and performs regulatory analysis based on metrics that concern linguistic complexity, restrictiveness, law interest, and industry-specific citation relevance. Our results were examined over time and validated by correlating them with known episodes of regulatory changes in Brazilian history, such as the implementation of new economic plans or the emergence of an energy crisis. Methods and metrics proposed by this framework can be used by policy makers to measure their own work and serve as inputs for future studies that could analyze government changes and their relationship with federal regulations.