Accession Number:

AD1122486

Title:

Comparing the House and Senate Versions of the National Defense Authorization Act

Descriptive Note:

[Technical Report, Research Note]

Corporate Author:

INSTITUTE FOR DEFENSE ANALYSES ALEXANDRIA VA

Personal Author(s):

• Odell, Laura
• Burton, Katharine
• Seitz-McLeese, Miranda

Report Date:

2017-10-01

Pagination or Media Count:

3

Abstract:

The DoD Office of Legislative Affairs spends significant resources comparing different versions of the National Defense Authorization Act NDAA in a process that has not changed in two decades. The current process for tracking changes between the House and Senate versions of an NDAA is manual and repetitive. Analysts compile tables with the House language on one side and the Senate language on the other,and then examine the text for differences. Simply searching for differences in the text takes up so much time that the subsequent work of analyzing the potential impact of the discovered differences or determining which version is likely to be present in the final version become secondary priorities. To save resources and allocate more time to analysis, the Office of Legislative Affairs asked IDA to see whether the IDATA capability could automate the text comparison process.

Descriptors:

• air force
• language
• national security
• radar
• algorithms
• marine corps
• natural language processing
• vector spaces
• artificial intelligence
• dictionaries
• frequency
• procurement
• verification
• warfare
• formal languages
• law
• maintenance
• mathematics
• probability
• production

Subject Categories:

• Administration and Management
• Information Science

Distribution Statement:

[A, Approved For Public Release]