AIRCC's International Journal of Computer Science and Information Technology

Yousef Elsheikh ¹, Mohammad Hijjawi ¹

Affiliations
1 Department of Computer Science, Applied Science University, Amman, JO

Abstract

Previous research indicates that there is a failure in the adoption of e-government services to citizens as planned in the context of developing countries. Obstacles behind this failure are varied, including sociocultural, economic and technical obstacles. But with recent advances in mobile technologies as well as the pervasive penetration of mobile phones, governments in developing countries including Jordan have been able to overcome most of these obstacles through the so-called mobile government (or m-government). This has provided an alternative channel for governments to improve the interaction with their citizens, as well as the quality of services provided to them. Accordingly, the exploration of the factors that affect the adoption of m-government services would reduce the gap between government strategies and policies relating to the development of m-government services on the one hand, and the perceptions of citizens on the other hand, allowing for a better understanding of citizens' needs and priorities that must be taken into account by the governments in order to ensure the success of such services on a large scale. This research is based on a re-evaluation of the empirical results of a comprehensive study conducted by Susanto and Goodwin (2010), which concludes that there are fifteen factors that are likely to affect citizens in 25 countries around the world to adopt SMS-based e-government services, but in the context of a different country in the Arab world, namely Jordan.

Keywords

Mobile-Government, Electronic-Government, SMS Technology, Developing Countries, Jordan.

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Mohammad Hijjawi ¹, Hesham Abusaimeh ¹

Affiliations
1 Department of Computer Science, Applied Science University, Amman, JO

Abstract

This paper discusses a prototype idea of applyinga Conversational Agent (CA) to be embedded into the Jordanian E-government websites. The Conversational Agent is a smart system used to handle natural conversations between user and machine. A Jordanian citizen facing struggles when he/she want to apply for a service through the E-government portal.In addition the Jordanians struggling when searched for a piece of information (for example the needed documents for a specific service) inside the E-government websites. This struggling comes from number of reasons such as the needed knowledge that the user could have to deal with such services and the big number of links that the user must visitto achieve his/her target. In addition, the Jordanian E-Government websites does not meet the users' requirements in their design. Instead, this paper proposes the idea of applying a prototype called CA into those websites as a general helpdesk automated service to save the Jordanians time and effort. Simply, the user will chat with the proposed CA with what he/she coming to do through the targeted website using a text based Arabic conversations. The CA's responses might be the exact needed link or the targeted information. Such a proposed service will strength the Jordanian E-government platform especially for accessibility and usability factors and as to best of our knowledge, no country has been applied it before.

Keywords

Electronic Government, Jordan, Usability, Accessibility and Conversational Agent.

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Mohammad Hijjawi ¹, Yousef Elsheikh ²

Affiliations
1 Department of Computer Science, Applied Science University, Amman, JO
2 Department of Computer Information Systems, Applied Science University, Amman, JO

Abstract

This paper is not to compare between the Arabic language and the English language as natural languages. Instead, it focuses on the comparison among them in terms of their challenges in building text based Conversational Agents (CAs). A CA is an intelligent computer program that used to handle conversations among the user and the machine. Nowadays, CAs can play an important role in many aspects as this work figured. In this paper, different approaches that can be used to build a CA will be differentiated. In each approach, the comparison aspects among the Arabic and English languages will be debated with the respect to the Arabic language.

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