TY - JOUR
T1 - Understanding Citizens' Direct Policy Suggestions to the Federal Government: A Natural Language Processing and Topic Modeling Approach
AU - Hagen, Loni
AU - Uzuner, Özlem
AU - Kotfila, Christopher
AU - Harrison, Teresa M.
AU - Lamanna, Dan
PY - 2015/1/1
Y1 - 2015/1/1
N2 - We report on our initial efforts to make sense of e-petitions as policy suggestions by using the NLP technique of "topic modeling" to identify the "topics" that emerge in e-petitions. Using a sample of petitions submitted to the Obama Administration's WtP petitioning system as a case study, we produced 30 emergent topics. 21 out of the 30 topics were initially coded as high-quality topics. Upon qualitative investigation, all but one of these 21 topics were determined to have a coherent theme. Our results imply that topic modeling has the potential to enable the interpretation of large quantities of citizen generated policy suggestions through a largely automated process, with potential application to research on e-participation and policy informatics.
AB - We report on our initial efforts to make sense of e-petitions as policy suggestions by using the NLP technique of "topic modeling" to identify the "topics" that emerge in e-petitions. Using a sample of petitions submitted to the Obama Administration's WtP petitioning system as a case study, we produced 30 emergent topics. 21 out of the 30 topics were initially coded as high-quality topics. Upon qualitative investigation, all but one of these 21 topics were determined to have a coherent theme. Our results imply that topic modeling has the potential to enable the interpretation of large quantities of citizen generated policy suggestions through a largely automated process, with potential application to research on e-participation and policy informatics.
UR - https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/si_facpub/327
UR - https://doi.org/10.1109/HICSS.2015.257
U2 - 10.1109/HICSS.2015.257
DO - 10.1109/HICSS.2015.257
M3 - Article
JO - 48th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
JF - 48th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
ER -