Abstract:
Sri Lanka is having numerous critical environmental problems and issues such as
deforestation, pollution of water bodies, natural disasters and many other urban
problems. Many of the communities who suffer from such environmental problems
are not attaining solutions for their vital problems due to lack of awareness,
inefficiency and carelessness of amenable parties such as environmental related
authorities and ministries in Sri Lanka. Within past few years, virtual communities
in Sri Lanka used social media for emphasizing numerous forms of social problems.
The intention of this research is to make the awareness of virtual community as a
compulsion towards the responsible parties in Sri Lanka which can work as a driving
force for stimulating reasonable solutions towards environmental problems.
The web based application discussed in this research has been designed to obtain
content of such environmental problems by soliciting contributions from
crowdsourcing. Online community can report environmental problems by using text
and images. Users of the application can vote and comment on the problems and
issues posted in the application. Each problem will receive points based on up or
down votes and comments they have received and then the application ranks genuine
high quality environmental problems while allocating points for each user in the
system. Text categorization is a subtask of information retrieval which used in this
application is very effective for filtering of environmental related information before
posting to the system. Further, this application is using the semantic information or
the polarity of user comments as positive, negative or neutral which are not used yet
for the most important natural language applications.
This research discussed about a study of the interaction between Natural Language
Processing and text categorization. Based on users negative or positive comments
and up or down votes, the application calculates the points for each post according
to a predefined criterion and highlights the genuine high quality environmental
problems and issues in Sri Lanka.
