New paper by R. Arunachalam and S. Sarkar: “Governments across the world facing unique challenges today than ever before. In recent time, Arab Spring
phenomenon is an example of how Governments can be impacted if they ignore citizen sentiment. It is a growing trend that Governments are trying to move closer to the citizen-centric model, where the priorities and services would be driven according to citizen needs rather than Government capability. Such trends are
forcing the Governments in rethinking and reshaping their policies in citizen interactions. New disruptive technologies like cloud, mobile etc. are opening new opportunities to the Governments to enable innovations in such interactions.
The advent of Social Media is a recent addition to such disruptive socio-technical enablers. Governments are fast realizing that it can be a great vehicle to get closer to the citizens. It can provide deep insight in what citizens want. Thus, in the current gloomy climate of world economy today, Governments can reorganize and reprioritize the allocation limited funds, thereby creating maximum impact on citizens’ life. Building such insight is a non-trivial task because of the huge
volume of information that social media can generate. However, Sentiment Analysis or Opinion Mining can be a useful vehicle in this journey.
In this work, we presented a model and case study to analyze citizen sentiment from social media in helping the Governments to take decisions.”