User profiling and satisfaction inference in public information access services

Public information access services are provided by dozens of countries around the world as a means to promote transparency and democracy, and present a number of research opportunities for the development of computational models that help understand both users and their needs. Based on these observations, the present work discusses how the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods may harvest valuable knowledge about citizen-government communication in user profiling and satisfaction inference tasks. More specifically, from a large text dataset of this kind, we build a number of models using a range of supervised machine learning methods - including bidirectional long short-term memory networks (LSTMs), pre-trained context-sensitive embeddings (BERT) and others - and show that these outperform textual and non-textual baseline alternatives alike. This outcome makes a case in favour of NLP methods for these tasks, and paves the way for further applications in the public information access domain.