The Government Internal Audit Agency (GIAA) is planning to increase its use of artificial intelligence with the further development of its Insights Engine.
It has received an award of £24,793 from the Government Office for Technology Transfer (GOTT) to work on the project, with an aim of making the capabilities available more widely around government.
The GIAA Insights Engine uses natural language process for the reading, summarising and analysis of hundreds of documents at speed. Its functions include identifying key themes, extracting the most relevant paragraphs of text and producing interactive summaries of the findings.
The agency - an executive agency of HM Treasury - has been using it analyse annual opinion reports, with the AI making it possible for one person to review 102 reports in the time it previously took a small team to look at 13.
The new funding is intended to support work on enabling the system to analyse a wider range of government documents and identify cross-government trends.
The Insights Engine is already used by organisations including HM Treasury and HM Inspectorate of Constabulary.
More refined use
GIAA director of innovation and development Dr Iain McGregor said: “Getting the grant from GOTT has enabled us to develop the text network analysis which allows for more refined use of the Insights Engine. We have since continued to develop it ourselves, to incorporate more features for users, but GOTT’s funding has helped us in the journey to expand it across government.
“Additionally, our dedicated point of contact at GOTT has given us helpful suggestions and helped refine our approach.”
