From Citizens to Decision-Makers: A Natural Language Processing Approach in Citizens' Participation

Citizens' participation is a form of democracy in which citizens are part of the decision-making process with regard to the development of their society. In today's emergence of Information and Communication Technologies, citizens can participate in these processes by submitting inputs through digital media such as social media platforms or dedicated websites. From these different means, a high quantity of data, of different forms (text, image, video), can be generated. This data needs to be processed in order to extract valuable data that can be used by a city's decision-makers. This paper presents natural language processing techniques to extract valuable information from comments posted by citizens. It applies the Latent Semantic Analysis on a corpus of citizens' comments to automatically identify the subjects that were raised by citizens.