AI Appeals Processor: A Deep Learning Approach to Automated Classification of Citizen Appeals in Government Services

Abstract

Government agencies must register, classify and route every citizen appeal within statutory time limits, and much of this work is still done by hand. We describe AI Appeals Processor, a classification and routing component deployed in a CPU-only government environment, and report what its evaluation and deployment taught us. On 10,000 real Russian-language appeals from a cross-domain dataset, we compare Bag-of-Words and TF-IDF with SVM, fastText, Word2Vec+LSTM and multilingual BERT on a three-way appeal-type task. On a held-out test set of 1,500 appeals, BERT reaches 82% accuracy and Word2Vec+LSTM 78%, against 67% for individual operators measured on an expert-adjudicated gold standard. We deployed the LSTM: in a workflow where an operator verifies every prediction, its lower training cost made frequent retraining on operator-verified labels practical, while the four-point accuracy gap did not change the operator's task. End-to-end handling time fell by 53-56% across four appeal-length bands (unweighted mean 22.5 to 10.25 minutes); model inference takes under two seconds of this. Most residual errors trace to the label taxonomy rather than the model: the statutory definitions of complaints and applications overlap, and many appeals carry two intents. A post-deployment audit of production classifications, made after several retraining cycles by operators who saw the assigned category, judged more than 95% correct; we explain why this figure is not comparable with the test-set result.