Natural language mobile interface to register citizen complaints

Abstract

Municipal corporation (MC) of a city is a local governing body which takes care of the functioning of the city. Among many other things one of the chief responsibilities of an MC includes addressing the complaints that the residents of the city might have. Maintenance of a large city requires that the MC be aware of any shortcomings either through surveillance (sensors/cameras) or by allowing the citizens to report them. The second option is usually preferred because there is a sense of belonging. A mechanism to accept complaints from citizens 24 times 7 would be the expectation from both the citizens and the MC. The Mumbai MC allows its citizens to place their complaints through several channels. The chief modes of complaint registration is (a) a visit to the ward office - where a person in charge listens to the complaint and asks for some personal details and put it across into an electronic form for other departments within the MC to handle the complaint, (b) through a contact center over a telephone - where the complaint is registered by an call center agent by typing the complaint into the system and more recently (c) through a web portal. In this paper, we propose a natural English enabled mobile interface which can be used to lodge complaints. The essential idea is to make use of the existing web portal infrastructure [6] and provide an easy, cheap and quick (complain as you see) mode of complaint registration around the clock. The proposed system enables and assists citizens to lodge compliant and seek redressal through their mobile phone in natural language.