A system to monitor the quality of automated coding of textual answers to open questions

The Italian National Statistical Institute (ISTAT) carried out some tests of automated coding of textual answers regarding Occupation, Education level, Industry, etc, using the ACTR system (Automated Coding by Text Recognition). The good results obtained led ISTAT to perform a further analysis of a large sample of textual data, in order to define a standardised procedure for reference when using ACTR instead of manual coding during a survey. The analysis shown in this paper aims at building up a system to monitor the quality of the results of automated coding and at verifying the improvements which can be achieved using the results of the monitoring activity to integrate the automated coding environment.