## 5 Discussion
### Implications for Future Research  
Based on the tendency of the current exponential growth of the NLP literature, it is expected that there will be more publications in government-related NLP in the future, where the publication volume will double every two years if the growth rate of the previous five years is sustained. To help researchers sailing through the rapid wave of NLP development, this study would like to put forward the following directions, which are noteworthy for future work:  
1. The Potential of Chatbots: The literature analysis reveals a lack of interest in chatbots, though government agencies have gradually shown their interest in chatbots recently, such as [65; 95]. Chatbot research is an active NLP research subfield, but the same may not be true in governmental research, given that \"the development of chatbots for public administration services has received very little attention\" [96]. In fact, chatbots are being used to perform a wide variety of tasks, for instance, placing orders for meals, making product recommendations, providing customer support, setting up meetings, etc. During the pandemic, chatbots' ability to \"chat\" with people caught the focus of governments, and they are used as a solution for maintaining conversational engagements under social distancing policies [97]. However, there are few chatbot applications developed for local administrative services [96]. With the introduction of ChatGPT, the conversational capabilities of AI-driven tools have reached the eyesight of the public. It can carry on a conversation by picking up and comprehending human languages and engaging in dialogues in accordance with the chat's context. One of ChatGPT's first models can successfully talk with its users in English and other languages on a variety of topics, which has generated both excitement and controversy [98]. This relaxed conversation mode is friendly to the elderly and those who do not know how to use electronic devices well. If governments and researchers plan to use chatbots, the emergence of large language models like ChatGPT will bring benefits since they are suitable for answering questions and providing solutions for citizens, which can enable citizens to easily access government services. 2. NLP Applications in the Post-Pandemic Era: Another finding of ours is that COVID-19 became a topic of concern studied by many governments. Governments around the world have organised much of their work around the pandemic, and NLP can gauge the effectiveness of government policies [87]. As the illness appears less severe and has turned into a type of respiratory infection, the post-pandemic era has begun, and the emphases of governments' work have also transformed. The disease has warned and reminded people of the importance of health and lifestyle, and therefore governments need to strengthen the management and the response to public health in the near future. Set against this background, what would be the public health issues that are worth following up on? This is a noteworthy question in the post-pandemic era. NLP approaches such as sentiment analysis and keyword summarisation can be used by governments for monitoring potential reports of infections. In addition, NLP techniques have been found to be useful in the reform of public health systems to collect citizens' feedback and their sentiments towards the changes [99]. This can serve as a potential future research direction as healthcare systems continue to evolve after the pandemic. 3. NLP Empirical Research for Government Work: Governance and policy formulation can be viewed as the main functions of governments, and researchers have conducted different NLP studies to tackle the issues in these areas, for instance, creating a contemporary government early warning system and public policy monitoring system to assess government credit in real-time [100]. Other governance-related research includes an NLP-based e-governance platform [101; 102] and decision-making systems [82; 103].