Topics › Method

How bills are tagged

1. Oklahoma bill titles start with a short heading (“Revenue and taxation; income tax credit; …”). A rule that matches the heading (text before the first semicolon) scores 3; a match anywhere else in the title scores 1 per rule; a match on the name of a committee the bill was referred to scores 2.
2. A bill gets a tag when its score is 2 or more. The highest-scoring topic is the bill's main topic. Patterns are case-insensitive and must start at a word boundary.
3. Industries use the same scoring. A bill may have no industry (many are about government itself).
4. Lobbyist principals (organizations that hire lobbyists, from the Ethics Commission principal list via OkLobbyGuide) get one industry: the first industry, in the order Alcohol, tobacco, cannabis & gaming → Insurance → Banking & finance → Health care & pharma → Oil, gas, energy & utilities → Agriculture & food → Technology & telecommunications → Transportation & vehicles → Real estate, housing & construction → Retail, hospitality & tourism → Lawyers & licensed professions → Public sector, tribes & education, whose name keywords match. Principals with no match are left unclassified.
5. Test bills (“this is a test bill”) are skipped. Coverage: 14,388 of 14,721 measures in all three sessions have a topic.

This is a keyword classifier, not a reading of the bill. It can miss a bill whose title uses unusual words and can mis-tag a bill that mentions a word in passing. The taxonomy is our own and is not the Legislature's subject index.

Topics 16

Industries 12