Resident-Initiated Smoking Ban Surveillance: Text Mining of Shanghai Public Service Hotline Data

Background: On March 1st, 2017, the Amendment of Regulations of Shanghai Municipality on Smoking Control in Public Places was formalized in Shanghai. Since then, this comprehensive smoke-free law prohibits smoking in indoor public places, workplaces, and public transport. To reinforce this law, the 12345 platform was introduced as an avenue for residents to report smoking violations. Methods: Throughout March 2017, the hotline back-end server had logged a total of 6,937 telephone text records. All records were collected, and text data were analyzed by natural language processing. The analysis of text data has gone through several steps, namely data masking, missing data deletion, data deduplication and No Dictionary Cutting Word arithmetic. Furthermore, we established a keyword corpus and a MySQL database for our research. Findings: Compared to the average monthly call sheets (1655 call sheets) between 2016 and 2018, the call sheets established in March 2017 alone was as high as 6,927. Residents were more willing to call the hotline for complaining and consulting in the month after the comprehensive smoking ban was enacted. The locations of the smoking violation reported mainly concentrated in the public workplace, food services, leisure industry, and hotels. Interpretation: The promulgate of the Amendment of Regulations of Shanghai Municipality on Smoking Control in Public Places has successfully garnered the attention and participation of the public. Nevertheless, further effort in strengthening the implementation and enforcement by relevant tobacco control agencies is still needed. Targeted management strategy, a pivotal future research direction, is needed to enforce the smoking band in the most reported location. Funding: This project was supported by National Social Science Fund of China (Grant No. 17BSH056). Declaration of Interest: All authors have no conflicts of interest on this study. Ethical Approval:The primary data in this study was provided by the department of shanghai health hotline. At the same time, the study was approved by the department of shanghai health hotline. In this study, subjects' identities were concealed, i.e. anonymous. For protecting the participants’ confidentiality and privacy, this study did not collect the caller’s personal information.