Resident-Initiated Smoking Ban Surveillance: Text Mining of Shanghai Public Service Hotline Data

2019

Background: On March 1st, 2017, the Amendment of Regulations of Shanghai Municipality on Smoking Control in Public Places was formalized in Shanghai. Since then, this comprehensive smoke-free law prohibits smoking in indoor public places, workplaces, and public transport. To reinforce this law, the "12345 hotline" platform was introduced as an avenue for residents to report smoking violations. Methods: Throughout March 2017, the hotline back-end server had logged a total of 6,937 telephone text records. All records were collected, and text data were analyzed by natural language processing. The analysis of text data has gone through several steps, namely data masking, missing data deletion, …