Natural Language Processing in Government

Introducton to NLP in Government

Artificial Intelligence is becoming a need of every sector nowadays, and it should be a part of every industry whether it is public sector or private sector. Comparing the adaptation of industries, apparently, the private sector is adopting artificial intelligence with full wide open hands, but the public sector is still in the naive stage in adopting the artificial intelligence for its functionality. Though from the last four and half year government sector picked up a different level of pace in adopting the technologies and artificial intelligence which are also a necessity now.This article will give an insight about role of NLP in Government sector.

It also helps in the evolution of the Government to e-governance. Considering the e-government, it works on a task which is to adopt the application of modern technologies (i.e., Natural Language Technologies). So what is natural language processing, where it can be used in the government sector and how to use native language processing in Government? Let’s find out.

A subset technique of Artificial Intelligence which is used to narrow the communication gap between the Computer and Human. Click to explore about, Evolution and Future of NLP

What are the key responsibilities in the field of Natural Language Processing?

It is the technologies that are used to narrow down the communication gap between Machines and Humans. It is also considered a part of techniques that are used to achieve the Goal of Artificial Intelligence implementation. Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) are the two important parts of Natural Language Processing which is used to implement the various tasks of NLP. Some of these major tasks are -

Speech Synthesis

It is a complex process in which the synthesis of natural-sounding speech takes place. It requires some understanding and knowledge of what should be spoken at that time. It results in understanding the semantic and syntactic relations between different sentences under a speech.

Recognition of Speech

In technical words, recognition of speech or speech recognition is a technique to do the decrement of continuous sound waves into discrete words. Given a clip of sound, the task here is to generate a text dictation of this clip. It is considered as a pre-processing measure for the text conversion process.

Information Retrieval

This technique is concerned with the use of information by retrieving, storing and then using it for searching required knowledge. Generally, it is considered as a separate field in computer science and also involved database management technologies. Here, NLP is used to pre-process the information. Researchers are still working on how to narrow the gap between different technologies of it and IR.

Machine Translation

It is considered as the mother use case of Natural Language Processing. In technical terms, converting one natural language into another language via machine is known as machine translation. It is considered one of the sophisticated use case of it. Apart from these essential tasks, some other tasks which are handled by NLP -

Automated Summarization
Aid for reading the foreign language
Assistance for writing the foreign language
Optical character recognition
Text to speech conversion
Text proofing
Automated Spell checkers
Automated Grammar checkers
Named entity recognition
Automated Question Answering system
Managing spoken dialogue
Automated text simplification

Natural Language Processing (NLP), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), and Natural Language Generation (NLG). Click to explore about, NLP vs. NLU vs. NLG

Technical activities handled by Government

Though the Government lacks behind in adopting Artificial Intelligence as compared to the private sector, it is moving forward in the right direction. The Government is taking modern emerging technologies in its architecture gradually. Now the requirement is how to scale things according to the changing environment.The technical activities or sub-part which are handled by the Government are -

Country Portal

It is considered as the one-stop for all the business related to the country. It is like an umbrella under which all various government department and ministries in the center and multiple agencies are accessible.

State Portal

This is a version of the country portal but on the state level. It consists of all of the functionalities mentioned above in regards to state government resources.

Electronic Data Processing (EDP)

It should find space at every level of state and central governments. It includes various technologies like Big data processing, Data Analytics, Data Processing and if required, machine learning and deep learning.

E-biz

These are the portals are defined as a one-stop for all Government (whether it state or central) to business services. Some of these services are -

Information about filing taxation, returns, refunds, and claims.
Information about rules and regulations, procedures and codes involved in running the businesses in the country or the state.
Recruitment facilities
Facilitation of the FDI
One stop window for all the procurement by the Government
Issues related to licenses, certifications, and permits.
Facilities for filing the reports, complaints and other requests.
Renewal of Licenses, permits, and certifications.
Feedback on various initiatives and discussion forums.

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Uses of NLP in Government

The integration of technology and Governance is already in use as e-Governance systems. It is also a part of these systems Anveshak (The Quester) is an example; it is an Information retrieval system which is based on it. But on the other hands, still more initiatives are needed to implement e-Governance systems which will be based on it. Because in the multilingual country like India, it can be a game changer. Let’s see how the uses of it in Government.

Uses of NLP in Government Websites

These websites are full of information and act as the primer layer for the offering of e-Governance services. For the websites like these, multilingual portals can be the biggest plus for handling requests from the different region which not only be helpful in development but will also provide a touch of personalization. This example is a part of e-governance websites of Bangladesh government. A chatbot is the second feature which can be a part of these websites which can serve complaints and requests 24/7 and 365 days.

Natural Language Generation in e-Governance

As stated above chatbot can be a feature which could be added to various government platforms but what if the chatbot is so intelligent that it can reply any query on its own. To accomplish this type of task, Natural Language Generation is needed. It can also provide an edge to choose the medium of communication (text or voice). Suppose a farmer can not read or write, but with the multilingual support and NLP generation, he can communicate his query in any language and get it resolved.

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Domains which should be focused under Natural Language Processing

Here is the list of areas (according to Indian Government) in it can provide a better future with better solutions -

Manufacturing
Fintech
Healthcare
Agriculture/Food Processing
Education
Retail/Customer Engagement
Aid for Differently Abled/Accessibility Technology
Human and Robot interaction/intelligent automation
Public Utility Services
General/other issues related to AI
AADHAAR/ Big Data
Environment
National Security
Enablers for AI Technology development
Enablers for AI entrepreneurship

A Holistic Strategy

The primary role of Natural Language Processing is to decrease the communication gap between Computer and Human. The benefit of adopting new technologies in government functionalities is that with the use of technologies, it results in the expansion beyond the operations related to Government to use electronic techniques in the delivery to the common people and to decrease the interaction gap between the citizen and the Government.