AI Agora is an innovative application at the intersection of learning and social justice, designed to empower scholars, social researchers, and citizens to explore publicly available Congressional Records in a meaningful and efficient way. By leveraging state-of-the-art Augmented Retrieval techniques, this project aims to democratize access to critical legislative information, fostering transparency and participation in the democratic process.
- Users can build tailored pipelines to browse and retrieve relevant data from the vast repository of Congressional Records hosted on Congress.gov.
- Flexibility to focus on specific topics, keywords, or debates.
- Scholars: Access structured tools for in-depth analysis of legislative language, trends, and social justice issues.
- Citizens: Stay informed and engaged with the democratic process by querying debates, bills, and amendments.
- Combines natural language processing (NLP) with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to offer precise and contextual results, even from complex legislative texts.
- Enhances public participation by breaking down barriers to understanding legislative language.
- Promotes equitable access to legislative data for underserved communities.
The democratic process should be accessible to everyone. Yet, vast and complex legislative records often make it difficult for citizens and scholars to engage. AI Agora bridges this gap by providing tools to:
- Analyze legislative trends.
- Identify key discussions relevant to social justice and public policy.
- Build knowledge pipelines that suit diverse needs, whether for academic research or civic activism.
- Data Retrieval: Pulls records from Congressional Records, including bills, debates, and legislative amendments.
- Text Splitting and Embedding:
- Processes legislative texts into manageable chunks.
- Embeds them into a vector database for fast and accurate retrieval.
- Pipeline Customization:
- Users can define their search parameters, such as topics, timeframes, or speakers.
- Interactive Querying:
- Input natural language questions or topics of interest.
- AI Agora retrieves, analyzes, and presents concise and contextualized answers with source references.
- Visualization and Insights:
- Optional data visualization to uncover trends in legislative discourse.
- Legislative Insights: "What were the main arguments in the debate over the 2024 budget bill?"
- Social Justice Focus: "How has Congress discussed climate change in the past year?"
- Trends Analysis: "What topics did Representative John Smith discuss most frequently in 2023?"
- LangChain: To manage the retrieval-augmented pipeline.
- OpenAI GPT-4: For advanced natural language understanding and generation.
- Chroma: Vector storage for efficient information retrieval.
- Gradio: For a clean and user-friendly interface.
- Congressional Records API: To access up-to-date legislative data.
AI Agora is more than just a tool—it's a step toward a more informed and engaged citizenry. By enhancing access to legislative records, it:
- Encourages participation in democratic processes.
- Reduces barriers to understanding complex legislative texts.
- Empowers communities to advocate for social justice by staying informed.
We welcome contributions from the community! Here’s how you can help:
- Fork the repository.
- Create a branch for your feature or bugfix.
- Commit your changes and push to your fork.
- Open a pull request to the main repository.
- Congress.gov: For making public records accessible.
- OpenAI: For enabling advanced NLP capabilities.
- Gradio: For providing a robust framework for the user interface.
If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to reach out via fed.dipasqua@stud.uniroma3.it
Let’s make democracy more accessible, one query at a time!