Applying text and data mining techniques to forecasting the trend of petitions filed to e-People

As the Internet has been the virtual place where citizens are united and their opinions are promptly shifted into the action, two way communications between the government sector and the citizen have been more important among activities of e-Government. Hence, Anti-corruption and Civil Rights Commission (ACRC) in the Republic of Korea has constructed the online petition portal system named e-People. In addition, the nation’s Open Innovation through e-People has gained increasing attention. That is because e-People can be applied for the virtual space where citizens participate in improving the national law and policy by simply filing petitions to e-People as the voice of the nation. However, currently there are problems and challenging issues to be solved until e-People can function as the virtual space for the nation’s Open Innovation based on petitions collected from citizens. First, there is no objective and systematic method for analyzing a large number of petitions filed to e-People without a lot of manual works of petition inspectors. Second, e-People is required to forecast the trend of petitions filed to e-People more accurately and quickly than petition inspectors for making a better decision on the national law and policy strategy. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the framework of applying text and data mining techniques not only to analyze a large number of petitions filed to e-People but also to predict the trend of petitions. In detail, we apply text mining techniques to unstructured data of petitions to elicit keywords from petitions and identify groups of petitions with the elicited keywords. Moreover, we apply data mining techniques to structured data of the identified petition groups on purpose to forecast the trend of petitions. Our approach based on applying text and data mining techniques decreases time-consuming manual works on reading and classifying a large number of petitions, and contributes to increasing accuracy in evaluating the trend of petitions. Eventually, it helps petition inspectors to give more attention on detecting and tracking important groups of petitions that possibly grow as nationwide problems. Further, the petitions ordered by their petition groups’ trend values can be used as the baseline for making a better decision on the national law and policy strategy. 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.