A study on comprehending the intention of administrative documents in the field of e-Government

Abstract

Policy plans published by government institutions have been widely available to the public on the Internet. However, it has been noted that there often exist many unclear expressions in the sentences. In this paper, we have proposed a method of considering the level of ambiguity as relates to the amount of confidence the writer has in the implementation of the policy presented. In the policy plans analyzed in this study, many unclear expressions existed at the end of sentences. We also confirmed that such policies using unclear expressions lowered the rate of successful implementation as a whole. We also analyzed the appearance frequency of the expression "nado (and so forth)" which makes nouns and verbs within sentences unclear. As a result, we were able to confirm that the more expressions such as "and so forth" are used within one sentence, the lower the success rate of implementation of the policy becomes. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.