发表机构
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）
机构由 AI 辅助整理，请以论文原文为准。AI 中文总结
本研究提出义务层面响应性审计框架，通过分析EPA2010-2022年的70075条评论，发现评论者在监管义务层面的能力差异导致公平不对称，且文本相似度方法难以区分编辑与实质性监管变更。
AI 中文摘要
通知与评论规则制定赋予任何受影响方影响联邦法规的同等正式权利，但正式获取渠道并不等同于塑造规则文本的实质能力。现有策略多在规则或整体语料库层面运作，过于粗略，无法捕捉评论者寻求变更的离散监管义务。我们引入义务层面响应性审计，这是一种可审计的AI辅助框架，用于衡量公众评论参与是否与特定监管义务的变更同时发生。该框架提取拟议规则与最终规则中的义务，将评论与其所针对的义务匹配，并对拟议-最终结果进行分类；每个核心组件均通过盲法人工判断评估。我们将该框架应用于2010-2022年来自6145个 docket的786197条评论语料库中，涉及36项EPA核心规则制定的70075条评论，得出三项描述性发现：第一，在单个 docket 内，参与与适度的修订幅度相关；第二，支持与反对的方向未明确区分结果，这一有价值的零结果与简单偏好聚合理论不符；第三，在对评论者类型的宽松重构下，组织主导的参与在跨 docket 层面集中于编辑性调整而非实质性修改结果。对核心结果对比的盲法人工审计在修正标签后保留了第三项发现，并揭示文本相似度方法不足以区分编辑性与实质性监管变更，这一测量有效性的教训被视为一项支持性方法学贡献。这些发现共同将公平不对称性定位于机构响应的上游：即不同评论者群体在识别、解读和质疑特定法律义务方面的能力差异。
英文摘要
Notice-and-comment rulemaking gives any affected party the same formal right to influence federal regulation, but formal access is not substantive capacity to shape rule text. Existing strategies operate at the rule or aggregate-corpus level, too coarse to capture the discrete regulatory obligations where commenters seek change. We introduce obligation-level responsiveness auditing, an auditable, AI-assisted framework for measuring whether public-comment engagement co-occurs with changes to specific regulatory duties. The framework extracts proposed and final-rule obligations, matches comments to the obligations they address, and classifies proposed-final outcomes; each load-bearing component is evaluated against blind human judgment. We apply the framework to 70,075 comments across 36 EPA anchor rulemakings, drawn from a corpus of 786,197 comments across 6,145 dockets from 2010-2022. Three descriptive findings emerge. First, engagement is associated with revision at a modest within-docket magnitude. Second, support-versus-opposition direction does not clearly differentiate outcomes, an informative null inconsistent with simple preference-aggregation. Third, under a permissive reconstruction of commenter type, organizational-majority engagement concentrates in editorial-refinement rather than substantive-modification outcomes at the cross-docket level. A blind human audit of the load-bearing outcome contrast preserves this third finding under corrected labels and reveals that text-similarity methods are insufficient for distinguishing editorial from substantive regulatory change, a measurement-validity lesson we treat as a supporting methodological contribution. Together, these findings locate the equity asymmetry upstream of agency response: in differential capacity across commenter populations to identify, interpret, and contest specific legal obligations.
Comments14 pages, 6 figures. Accepted as a full paper at the 6th ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization (EAAMO '26), Munich, Germany. Selected for oral presentation
