To Call, or To Tweet? Understanding 3-1-1 Citizen Complaint Behaviors
Vanessa Frías-Martínez, Abson Sae-Tang, Enrique Frı́as-Martı́nez · 2012
3-1-1 phone services offer citizens a crowdsourced platform to call and report about issues in their communi-ties. In recent years, local governments and agencies have started to offer new communication channels through social media including Twitter accounts. Although not its main purpose, citizens are using these channels as a way to communicate 3-1-1 service requests to their local authorities. Furthermore, Twitter is also being used by citizens to share issues about their communities with friends and colleagues, without specifically addressing it to any local authority. In this paper, we analyze the behavioral similarities and differences between the use of formal 3-1-1 phone services and informal channels – like Twitter – to report about issues that affect a community. Our end objective is to help public institutions understand the relevance of informal communication channels as data sources for service requests. For that purpose, we design and evaluate a set of supervised classifiers that automat-ically label tweets as complaints and determine its type. A weighted multiclass classifier was selected based on its performance with precision and recall values of 86 % and 62%, respectively. By comparing labeled tweets against official 3-1-1 phone service request records, we provide a large-scale analysis of citizen complaint behaviors over the two crowdsourced channels. I