Natural Language Processing to Enhance Deliberation in Political Online Discussions: A Survey
It addresses the problem of improving deliberation quality in digital political discussions for participants and platform designers, but is incremental as it is a survey.
The paper surveys issues in political online discussions and explores how machine learning can be used to counteract these issues and enhance deliberation, without presenting new experimental results or specific numerical outcomes.
Political online participation in the form of discussing political issues and exchanging opinions among citizens is gaining importance with more and more formats being held digitally. To come to a decision, a careful discussion and consideration of opinions and a civil exchange of arguments, which is defined as the act of deliberation, is desirable. The quality of discussions and participation processes in terms of their deliberativeness highly depends on the design of platforms and processes. To facilitate online communication for both participants and initiators, machine learning methods offer a lot of potential. In this work we want to showcase which issues occur in political online discussions and how machine learning can be used to counteract these issues and enhance deliberation.