About Signals

Understanding how the Mandate Pipeline detects and categorizes signals in UN documents.

What are Signals?

Signals are specific phrases or patterns in UN General Assembly documents that indicate particular types of mandates, requests, or procedural actions. The Mandate Pipeline automatically scans operative paragraphs of resolutions and proposals to identify these signals.

Each signal corresponds to a category of action that the General Assembly may take, such as requesting reports, scheduling meetings, or establishing processes.

Signal Types

agenda

Indicates decisions about agenda items, scheduling of future consideration, or requests for inclusion in upcoming sessions.

Trigger Phrases

decides to include decides to place on the provisional agenda requests the inclusion invites the Secretary-General to brief requests the President of the General Assembly to hold a meeting decides to convene a meeting decides to review decides to consider

PGA

References the President of the General Assembly, high-level meetings, interactive dialogues, or multistakeholder events.

Trigger Phrases

President of the General Assembly decides to hold decides to convene high-level meeting shall be held interactive dialogue multistakeholder high-level panel high-level segment

process

Indicates procedural arrangements such as the appointment of co-facilitators, co-chairs, or informal consultations.

Trigger Phrases

co-facilitators co-chairs co-conveners informal consultations

report

Requests for reports from the Secretary-General or other bodies to inform the General Assembly.

Trigger Phrases

report to the General Assembly submit a report report thereon shall report apprise the General Assembly inform the General Assembly include in his report include in the report Secretary-General to submit Secretary-General to report Secretary-General to provide a report submit to the General Assembly report to the Assembly

observer

Miscellaneous signal type.

Trigger Phrases

capacity of observer

How Detection Works

Document Processing: PDF documents are parsed to extract text content.
Paragraph Extraction: Operative paragraphs (numbered paragraphs in the resolution body) are identified and extracted.
Phrase Matching: Each paragraph is scanned for the trigger phrases defined for each signal type.
Signal Assignment: When a phrase is found, the corresponding signal is assigned to that paragraph.
Aggregation: Signals are aggregated at the document level for filtering and analysis.

Configuration

Signals are configured in the config/checks.yaml file. Each signal definition includes:

signal: The name/identifier for the signal type
phrases: A list of text patterns that trigger this signal when found in a paragraph

Phrase matching is case-insensitive. A paragraph can have multiple signals if it contains phrases from different signal types.