  Formal rules and policies are fundamental in formally specifying a social
system: its operation, boundaries, processes, and even ontology. Recent
scholarship has highlighted the role of formal policy in collective knowledge
creation, game communities, the production of digital public goods, and
national social media governance. Researchers have shown interest in how online
communities convene tenable self-governance mechanisms to regulate member
activities and distribute rights and privileges by designating
responsibilities, roles, and hierarchies. We present NLP4Gov, an interactive
kit to train and aid scholars and practitioners alike in computational policy
analysis. The library explores and integrates methods and capabilities from
computational linguistics and NLP to generate semantic and symbolic
representations of community policies from text records. Versatile, documented,
and accessible, NLP4Gov provides granular and comparative views into
institutional structures and interactions, along with other information
extraction capabilities for downstream analysis.
