Facilitating Opinion Diversity through Hybrid NLP Approaches
This addresses the challenge of enhancing citizen engagement in democracies through online forums, but it is incremental as it builds on existing NLP and human-AI technologies.
The paper tackles the problem of declining citizen participation in decision-making by proposing a hybrid human-AI approach to facilitate large-scale online discussions, using a three-layered hierarchy to represent perspectives and draw insights into diversity and interactions.
Modern democracies face a critical issue of declining citizen participation in decision-making. Online discussion forums are an important avenue for enhancing citizen participation. This thesis proposal 1) identifies the challenges involved in facilitating large-scale online discussions with Natural Language Processing (NLP), 2) suggests solutions to these challenges by incorporating hybrid human-AI technologies, and 3) investigates what these technologies can reveal about individual perspectives in online discussions. We propose a three-layered hierarchy for representing perspectives that can be obtained by a mixture of human intelligence and large language models. We illustrate how these representations can draw insights into the diversity of perspectives and allow us to investigate interactions in online discussions.