International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887) International Conference on Distributed Computing and Internet Technology (ICDCIT-2015) 24 Evolving Sentiments towards E-Governance using Opinion Mining Pankaj Kumar Assistant Professor SRMGPC, Lucknow Alisha Zaidi Student - B. Tech SRMGPC, Lucknow Ankita Srivastava Student - B. Tech SRMGPC, Lucknow Geet Jain Student - B. Tech SRMGPC, Lucknow ABSTRACT Today in current scenario, much of the research are focusing on opinion mining and sentiments analysis due to its high volume of opinion available in blogs, discussion forum, review sites, surveys, news, social network sites etc available in electronic format. Now researchers are anticipated to build up a system that can recognize and classify opinion as represented in digital form. We have a chance to make appropriate belief of a thousand views and discover problems as soon as they occur. Opinion mining can be made appropriately as a sub-discipline of computational linguistics that exactly concentrates on extracting people‟s opinion from the web, surveys and other which are available digitally. Opinion mining gives us direction in building a system by which we can bring together and inspect opinions about the product available digitally such as surveys, blogs and other online format. Here in this paper we have considered E-Governance basically as the application of Information and Communications Technology to define the functioning of Government in order to bring about „Simple, Moral, Accountable, Responsive and Transparent‟ (SMART) governance. In this paper we are trying to evolve the sentiments towards E- Government projects and policies on the basis of opinion collected from the people. We try to analyze the effectiveness of E-governance using the concept of opinion mining. For this we took the opinions of people regarding smart city. Keywords E-governance, opinion mining, sentiment analysis. 1. INTRODUCTION As citizens of India, we have to deal with government in our day-to-day lives. Citizens expect speedy service, proper treatment, and quick disposal of grievances or applications. This interaction, however, is not always pleasant as for different classes of people the perception and impact of government projects and policies are different. With the rising awareness among citizens about their rights, Government today, is expected to be transparent in its dealings, accountable for its activities and faster in its responses [1, 7]. The emergence of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has provided means for faster and better communication, efficient storage, retrieval and processing of data and exchange and utilization of information to its users, be they individuals, groups, businesses, organizations or governments [2, 8]. Thus, the use of opinion mining and sentiment analysis tools can help in bridging this gap between the government and the citizens. According to the World Bank “E-Government refers to the use by government agencies of information technologies (such as Wide Area Networks, the Internet, and mobile computing) that have the ability to transform relations with citizens, businesses, and other arms of government. These technologies can serve a variety of different ends: better delivery of government services to citizens, improved interactions with business and industry, citizen empowerment through access to information, or more efficient government management. The resulting benefits can be less corruption, increased transparency, greater convenience, revenue growth, and/ or cost reductions.”Thus, the concentration here is on use of information technologies in improving citizen-government connections, cost-cutting and creation of revenue and clearness [4,9]. Opinion mining is the field of study that analyzes people‟s opinions, sentiments, evaluations, appraisals, attitudes, and emotions towards entities such as products, services, organizations, individuals, issues, events, topics, and their attributes. Sentiment analysis is a type of natural language processing for tracking the mood of the public about a particular product or topic [3, 4, 11]. It is about determining the subjectivity, polarity (positive or negative) and polarity strength (weakly positive, mildly positive, strongly positive, etc.) of a piece of text – Opinion mining differs from pure data and text mining in so far it deals with subjective statement. In this sense, it is a specific development of a discipline dealing with unstructured information extraction (IE) that was previously mainly working with objective data such as natural disasters or bibliographic information [5, 10]. In this paper, our main concern is to find out the sentiments of various classes of people regarding e-governance focusing mainly on the Smart City project. Concept of the smart city has been introduced as a strategic device to encompass modern urban production factors in a common framework and to highlight the growing importance of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), social and environmental capital in profiling the competitiveness of cities. The significance of these two assets - social and environmental capital - itself goes a long way to distinguish smart cities from their more technology-laden counterparts, drawing a clear line between them and what goes under the name of either digital or intelligent cities. 2. RELATED WORK In the paper “e-Governance Project Lifecycle” published by National Institute for Smart Government, www.nisg.org on behalf of the Department of Electronics & Information Technology, Government of India, it is stated that E- Governance is the tool used by the government for discharging its functions for the welfare of the citizens. So it is has to be citizen-friendly. Delivery of services to citizens and promoting their rights are considered primary functions of the government. For doing so government has to change its outlook and its way of interacting with citizens. In a democratic nation of over one billion people like India, e- Governance should enable seamless access to information and