Helping Answers Decision Service

Acronym of the case:

HANDS

Web address of the case:

http://www.hands-online.org

Country of the case:

Belgium , Germany , Italy , United Kingdom

Posting Date:

11 December 2007

Last Edited Date:

15 February 2008

Author:

Patrizia Marani (Comune di Bologna)

Accessibility | public-bodies | NLP

Type of initiative

Project or service

Case Abstract

The HANDS service is an on-line communication service designed to facilitate and ameliorate communication between citizens and Public Bodies, not only local, but also regional and national. It allows citizensâ€™ dialogue with the Public Bodies, using their everyday language, thereby obtaining a direct pre-structured and, at the same time, richer interaction. HANDS service is based on advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. The citizens access HANDS through the Public Bodyâ€™s web site, by means of a dedicated area supporting the possibility to query the system. They type their questions on the keyboard using everyday language, without the need to use keywords or boolean operators, and they obtain relevant answers in their language.

Description of the case

Domain

eGovernment

Topic

Open Source | Services for Citizens | eParticipation, eDemocracy and eVoting

Sector

Education, Science and Research | Other | Local/Regional Community Development

Start date - End date

November 2005 (Ongoing)

Date operational

November 2005

Target Users

Citizen | Administrative

Target Users Description

HANDS benefits most of the local population of a city, including young and elderly. The project currently targets European Public Bodies of any sector dealing with citizens and Public Utilities. In HANDS there is no specific feature that prevents its use from other kinds of customers, whose market areas will be fully addressed in the next years (for example: Bank, Insurance, Transport, University, etc.).

Scope

Regional (sub-national) | Local (city or municipality)

Status

Pilot

Language(s)

German | English | Italian

Policy Context and Legal Framework

Citizens strongly demand for quick and easy ways to communicate and interact with Public Bodies (PB) and get relevant responses to their enquiries. Public Bodies need to improve their capacity to respond to the needs of their communities and improve the quality of their communication services and the efficiency of their procedures and staff. By providing understandable and clear information in their own everyday language, citizens will be better informed and e-participation will be enhanced.

HANDS fulfils two important aspects connected to accessibility and ICT, as written in eEurope2005 web site: ? â€œAll citizens have the right to use all benefit from new opportunities that the Information Society offers. People with disabilities and older persons experience sometimes difficulties to access these new technologies and services, as some barriers can be inadvertently created by the Information Society itself. Accessibility problems can also be created by specific environment or social conditions.â€ ? â€œOn the other hand Information Technologies and Services can greatly help to overcome other environmental or social barriers, encountered by people with disabilities and older persons.â€

With regard to the Strategic Objectives of the eTen Programme, HANDS positively impacts on the economic environment at the local level, it increases the knowledge of the PB operators working with the service application, and generally the ameliorated relationship between citizens and their government improves the social cohesion of the involved communities.

The HANDS service will contribute to positively change the way Public Administrations and other relevant service providers operate, through the focus the service poses on interactivity, through the organisational change induced at the PB level, and through the finally improved relationship between PBâ€™s (or other service providers), and their users (see eEurope 2005 Action Plan).

Project Size and Implementation

Type of initiative

Inclusive services of general interest

Overall Implementation approach

Public administration

Technology choice

Open source software

Funding source

Public funding EU

Project size

Implementation: Not applicable/not available

Implementation and Management Approach

The starting point of the project was a set of operational prototypes developed by the IST 20230 Project EDEN (Electronic Democracy European Network). EDEN developed and tested five applications designed to improve online communication between citizens and public administrations based on Natural Language Processing technologies.

The HANDS project takes up two of the five NLP components developed within EDEN, and integrates them into a fully marketable platform. It also brings together the Address Guesser (an automatic email message dispatcher to the relevant offices) and the Answer Tree (a tool for the management of FAQ lists). The technical approach is therefore based on mature technologies.

Technology solution

The technology framework of HANDS is based on three main architectural components:
- a Data Set, including the data and documents processed by the linguistic platform;
- a linguistic platform, providing the core functionality of HANDS;
- the Functional Components (Address Guesser and Answer Tree) that implement the services provided by HANDS.

The Address Guesser automatically routes emails to the most appropriate receiver by using statistical techniques based on the vector space model approach. The HANDS linguistic platform, that transforms plain text documents into a linguistic structured formal representation, assures a high number of relevant results. The Answer Tree is a FAQ list manager with an advanced interface to query the system in natural language.

HANDS software is available free under general Open Source conditions (GPL license). The HANDS service components and documentation have been enhanced and packed into a single, final market-ready package, assembled for the initial deployment.

The Service Package is addressed to technical staff of HANDS service potential customers, that is system administrators, database administrators, IT consultants. It contains the software, in Italian, English, German, the documentation and other tools.

The distribution model foresees that the package will be downloadable from the HANDS Group web site.

Impact, innovation and results

Impact

- Improved quality of service. The service enables the Public Bodyâ€™s enquiry-handling staff to progressively adapt online information to reflect the answers given to citizens/customersâ€™ enquiries, so they become more oriented to questions that they actually ask.

- Improved staff efficiency: by increasing the proportion of enquiries citizens/customers can answer themselves, and reducing the training/skill needs of PB staff.

- For Citizens and Utility Customers, the benefit is the availability of easier online interaction with the Public Bodies. The HANDS service reduces the skills needed for citizens/users to find relevant answers to their questions online, thus potentially widening the take-up of Public Sector e-services.

Track record of sharing

We assessed the acceptability of the HANDS service in each pilot site for the identified stakeholders:
- users (citizens and PB's staff)
- technical support / ICT
- management
- developers
- others: policy makers, politicians etc.

We made a qualitative and quantitative assessment of the service according to the following criteria:
- practical and technical acceptability
- usefulness
- social and organisational acceptability

We tested the applicationâ€™s acceptability by increasing citizens' capability of finding answers, and ensuring that the questions asked of human operators are non-routine because the citizens have been able to find answers to frequently asked questions.

Secondly, we identified the opportunities and barriers to deployment, which include understanding the factors that will affect the decision by a PBâ€™s management on whether to use HANDS.

We have been able to identify the factors that increase acceptability and give the developers the opportunity to incorporate them in the application package. We have also been able to establish the main objective for utility; the results also indicate improved skills in configuring the application lead to better performance, and that performance can be maintained even with the addition of new domains.

We also investigated the perspective of the people who will decide whether or not to use HANDS: the managers and owners.

Lessons learnt

Lesson 1 - HANDS should not be seen as a potential substitute of the traditional communication channels (e.g. searching in the Councilâ€™s website, phone calling or directly going to the relevant office). More realistically, the service should be considered as a complementary tool able to integrate the information obtained through other channels, providing citizens with the missing details they need.

Lesson 2 - HANDS is currently available in three main languages: English, German and Italian. The NLP engine should be kept updated to get always good results, especially in the complex German language. HANDS can be provided also in other languages (e.g. French), if the NLP engine and grammar are developed. This implies a stronger effort as for the phase of system training, tuning and testing, and the preparation of technical documentation (manuals etc) to be used by operators in different countries speaking different languages.

Lesson 3 - HANDS can be a very useful tool to improve the Public Bodies internal work organisation, i.e. the way of handling and processing citizensâ€™ queries. In order to achieve this goal, it is crucial to raise awareness of various factors in the Public Bodies:
- Current inefficient query-handling in the organisations;
- Potential of ICT to significantly improve this lack;
- Potential to generate high quality feedback on the information and services customers and citizens needs;
- Opportunities for PBs to combine OSS & proprietary products and services.

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