Assessing NATO policy alignment through text analysis: An initial study

This paper summarises the results of an initial study examining the alignment of NATO Policy documents through text analysis. The paper describes a simple approach to abstracting content from policy and implementation documents through subject matter expert (SME)-guided dictionary creation, and we describe the implementation of novel methods to measure and visualize the alignment between pairs of documents. We describe how the process was implemented to measure the vertical and horizontal alignment of NATO policy and implementation documents to provide real-time support for the drafting of NATO documents. We discuss challenges faced in the implementation, and propose potential future solutions.