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Civic engagement platforms such as SeeClickFix and FixMyStreet have revolutionized the way citizens interact with local governments to report and resolve urban issues. However, recognizing which urban issues are important to the community in an accurate and timely manner is essential for authorities to prioritize important issues, allocate resources and maintain citizens' satisfaction with local governments. To this end, a novel formulation based on optimal stopping theory is devised to infer urban issues importance from ambiguous textual, time and location information. The goal is to optimize recognition accuracy, while minimizing the time to reach a decision. The optimal classification and stopping rules are derived. Furthermore, a near-real-time urban issue reports processing method to infer the importance of incoming issues is proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated on a real-word dataset from SeeClick-Fix, where significant reduction in time-to-decision without sacrificing accuracy is observed.
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Automating the Classification of Urban Issue Reports: an Optimal Stopping Approach
Empowering citizens to interact directly with their local governments through civic engagement platforms has emerged as an easy way to resolve urban issues. However, for authorities to manually process reported issues is both impractical and inefficient; accurate, online and near-real-time processing methods are necessary to maintain citizens' satisfaction with their local governments. Herein, an optimal stopping framework is proposed to process urban issue requests quickly and accurately. The optimal classification and stopping rules are derived, and significant reduction in time-to-decision without sacrificing accuracy is demonstrated on a real-world dataset from SeeClickFix.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1737443
- PAR ID:
- 10115007
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 3137 to 3141
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/ICASSP.2019.8682778
