Free text search within a survey

As part of the ongoing pedestrian facilities planning, the city of Helsinki did a questionnaire among almost 1800 citizens on “How the Helsinki city center is performing as a walking place?”. What are the nicest places, which things should be changed to make it more attractive for pedestrians? The dataset is publicly accessible. After downloading, we converted the .csv file to json and uploaded the whole data set to Aito. No particular data preparation was done. Aito is able to do text parsing so comparatives and superlatives are converted to their basic form, allowing the machine learning algorithms to interpret the text better.

Interesting facts

Aito’s generic query was used to see if there are interesting facts to discover from this data set. The generic query allows free text search with multiple words.

As this was a local survey, the answers are recorded in Finnish. Via the search bar below, different search terms can be tried out to see how the answers change.

Examples:

• Good for kids = hyvä lapsille
• Nice park = kiva puisto
• Good biking roads = hyvät pyöräilytiet

{}

The generic query matches the search terms with the comments from the survey and renders the relevant locations, according to the frequency mentioned.