Streamlining Municipal Governance: Detecting Redundancy in Regulation Plans Using Text Embeddings in Local Government
摘要
Modern municipalities must manage an ever-growing volume of zoning and building regulations for urban planning, making it challenging to maintain a coherent and up-to-date legal framework. As an administrative area grows in size and personnel, it becomes impossible for individual caseworkers and planners to maintain a complete overview of its zoning regulations. Over time, the regulatory plans become outdated, albeit still legally binding. Adding new modern zoning plans on top of the planning hierarchy has been a de facto practice. Leading to overlapping information and potentially conflicting legally binding documents for the same geographic area. This paper explores methods for automatically detecting redundant or overlapping regulation documents using state-of-the-art text embedding techniques and evaluates a selection of both open and proprietary models for this purpose.