Design and Development of E-Governance Model for Service Quality Enhancement

Governance is a process of establishing policies or laws and continuously monitoring their implementation in the public. Citizens are the main stakeholders in this process. To make the governance process cost effective, easy and convenient to the citizens, information and communication technologies (ICTs) are playing a vital role. Using ICTs in governance domain can be referred as e-governance. It helps citizen to participate not only in policy making but also in service quality improvements and getting government services over network. Web technology is one of the major technologies that have been used in e-governance as a major contributor. Before invention of web, citizens used to write their opinions and send to concerned body via post mail or local suggestion box for improvements of services. After the invention of the web, it became possible to post or send the opinions/comments over organization’s web sites or portals. As the number of comments increases over the web, it is very difficult to have relevant information for furthering the decision making processes. In these study, text processing and data mining techniques have been used. The prototype system classifies citizen’s opinions in one of six service categories with the precision of 87.3% and recall of 85.8%. Further, the system determines opinions as appreciation with the precision of 100% for both depression and appreciation, and average recall of 90.85% for both depression and appreciation. The results obtained from the prototype system indicate that the techniques that have been applied are promising for real world application in e-governance.

Enhancing Amharic Information Retrieval System Based on Statistical Co-Occurrence Technique

Information retrieval (IR) systems are designed to help information seekers retrieving relevant information from vast document. The need for relevant information from a vast amount of document gave birth to IR systems. Even though different IR systems exist, they cannot meet all users’ expectations. A different level of users’ knowledge makes queries to be expressed in different ways. As a result, the system may miss the core meaning of users query and retrieve dissatisfactory results. This happens mainly because of the ambiguities of words involved in the natural languages and expression mismatch among users and authors. The existing ambiguities in Amharic language have negative impacts on the performance of Amharic IR system. Some of the ambiguities for this type of problem are: spelling variants of the same word, polysemous and synonymous terms. If users are not fully knowledgeable about the information domain area, they will mostly formulate weak queries to retrieve documents. Thus, they end up frustrated with the results found from an IR system. This research has been conducted, aiming at augmenting the recall of previous work. Statistical co-occurrence technique has been used in order to expand query terms. The main reason for performing query expansion is to provide relevant documents as per users’ query that can satisfy their information need. Statistical co-occurrence method considers, frequently appearing terms with the query term, regardless of their position. The efficiency of proposed technique has been tested on the prototype system and the result found compared with the result of previous study. Accordingly, 6% recall and 2% f-measure improvement has been made. Hence, the statistical co-occurrence method outperformed the bi-gram based IR system.