The Government has a strong interest in protecting nuclear and national security information while maximizing the availability of information about its operations. Towards this end federal agencies have developed tens of thousands of 'guidance rules' to help determine what is or is not classified, and at what level. Trained and certified document reviewers apply these rules. The Reviewer's Assistant System (RAS) at the Department of Energy is a new type of expert system that uses a relational database to store very large numbers of rules. It is being developed to automatically apply DOE guidance rules to text documents. This requires far more than a mere keyword search, as the ideas being distinguished can be quite subtle. The purpose of the system is not to 'understand' the documents it processes, but rather to simply check them for the existence of certain ideas or facts. This technology for 'concept-spotting' can be applied to other areans, such as detecting junk email or searching web sites. This paper will discuss the features, goals and general methods of the Reviewers Assistant System.
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