This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will test the commercial feasibility of "Custom Computer Programming Services" supporting human and machine text classification. Initially, the company's research, tools, and methods will target public and private sector markets where the ability to review, analyze, and summarize public communications in e-mail, blogs, Web sites, Twitter feeds, and many other forms of digitized documents, is crucial. A The effort will support programming and evaluation activities for the proposed "Sifter" document classification software. The SBIR-funded research will focus on three key technical challenges that must be met to ensure commercial success: usability, reliability, and scalability. Texifter's technology addresses the widespread government and private sector problem that e-mail and other Web-based public comment channels currently overload government rule-writers and other text analysts. This overload has been identified as among the most significant concerns facing federal agency and congressional personnel today in focus group sessions involving over 200 federal agency end-users from more than a dozen of the major 180 federal rule-writing agencies held between 2003 and 2008. If successful, this effort will improve the democratic underpinning of the public comment process. The Sifter tool will enable the voice of the public to be heard more clearly by agency officials by amplifying genuinely unique utterances while suppressing the stifling effect of duplicate and insubstantial public comments
