PPCR-IM: A System for Multi-layer DAG-based Public Policy Consequence Reasoning and Social Indicator Mapping

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Authors: Zichen Song, Weijia Li
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Public policy decisions are typically justified using a narrow set of headline indicators, leaving many downstream social impacts unstructured and difficult to compare across policies. We propose PPCR-IM, a system for multi-layer DAG-based consequence reasoning and social indicator mapping that addresses this gap. Given a policy description and its context, PPCR-IM uses an LLM-driven, layer-wise generator to construct a directed acyclic graph of intermediate consequences, allowing child nodes to have multiple parents to capture joint influences. A mapping module then aligns these nodes to a fixed indicator set and assigns one of three qualitative impact directions: increase, decrease, or ambiguous change. For each policy episode, the system outputs a structured record containing the DAG, indicator mappings, and three evaluation measures: an expected-indicator coverage score, a discovery rate for overlooked but relevant indicators, and a relative focus ratio comparing the systems coverage to that of the government. PPCR-IM is available both as an online demo and as a configurable XLSX-to-JSON batch pipeline.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Evaluation and Performance Assessment Public Policy and Administration Research E-Government and Public Services

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
25 February 2026
Language
EN
Document type
Preprint