PecidRL: Petition expectation correction and identification based on deep reinforcement learning

Identifying petition expectation for government response plays an important role in government administrative service. Although some petition platforms allow citizens to label the petition expectation when they submit e-petitions, the misunderstanding and misselection of petition labels still has necessitated manual classification involved. Automatic petition expectation identification has faced challenges in poor context information, heavy noise and casual syntactic structure of the petition text. In this paper we propose a novel deep reinforcement learning based method for petition expectation (citizens' demands for the level of government response) correction and identification named PecidRL. We collect a dataset from Message Board for Leaders, the largest official petition platform in China, containing 237,042 petitions. Firstly, we introduce a deep reinforcement learning framework to automatically correct the mislabeled and ambiguous labels of the petitions. Then, multi-view textual features, including word-level and document-level semantic features, sentiment features and different textual graph representations are extracted and integrated to enrich more auxiliary information. Furthermore, based on the corrected petitions, 19 novel petition expectation identification models are constructed by extending 11 popular machine learning models for petition expectation detection. Finally, comprehensive comparison and evaluation are conducted to select the final petition expectation identification model with the best performance. After performing correction by PecidRL, each metric on all extended petition expectation identification models improves by an average of 8.3% with the highest increase ratio reaching 14.2%. The optimal model is determined as Peti-SVM-bert with the highest accuracy 93.66%. We also analyze the petition expectation label variation of the dataset by using PecidRL. We derive that 16.9% of e-petitioners tend to exaggerate the urgency of their petitions to make the government pay high attention to their appeals and 4.4% of the petitions urgency are underestimated. This study has substantial academic and practical value in improving government efficiency. Additionally, a web-server is developed to facilitate government administrators and other researchers, which can be accessed at http://www.csbg-jlu.info/PecidRL/.