Digital innovations have reshaped citizen participation both in terms of the amount of people that can be involved and in terms of the forms of their interaction. How about the quality of the discussions, which are not just a preparatory step, but at the core any deliberation process? Discussion quality is not guaranteed to scale up to large user crowds — quite the opposite.
The talk will focus on the crucial role Natural Language Processing (NLP) can play in supporting digital democracy. The perfect debater, holy grail in NLP research on argumentation, is probably not the best team player in a deliberative discussion: what is needed is an interdisciplinary approach integrating NLP, Deliberative Theory, as well as the know-how of deliberation experts who design, organize, and moderate real world participation processes.
Discussant: Prof. André Bächtiger (Institute for Social Sciences/ZIRIUS)
Moderation: Dr. Kathrin Braun (ZIRIUS)