Machine learning is better than human to satisfy decision by majority

Government 2.0 activities have become very attractive and popular these days. Using platforms to support the activities, anyone can anytime report issues or complaints in a city with their photographs and geographical information on the Web, and share them with other people. Since a variety of reports are posted, officials in the city management section have to check the importance of each report and sort out their priorities to the reports. However, it is not easy task to judge the importance of the reports. When several officials work on the task, the agreement rate of their judgments is not always high. Even if the task is done by only one official, his/her judgment sometimes varies on a similar report. To remedy this low agreement rate problem of human judgments, we propose a method of detecting signs of danger or unsafe problems described in citizens' reports. The proposed method uses a machine learning technique with word feature selection. Experimental results clearly explain the low agreement rate of human judgments, and illustrate that the proposed machine learning method has much higher performance than human judgments.