Surfacing Public Voices

As technology continues to fundamentally transform how the federal government delivers key services, it will become increasingly important to understand the needs of those who depend on these programs. Our team is investigating ways that natural language processing, machine learning, and other techniques can help federal agencies systematically detect needs expressed in the public sphere and that sometimes fail to be captured by existing surveys. This work could help narrow the information gap about traditionally disadvantaged and other hard-to-capture populations who have low survey participation rates.