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.
@article{arxiv.2405.09439,
title = {Facilitating Opinion Diversity through Hybrid NLP Approaches},
author = {Michiel van der Meer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.09439},
year = {2024}
}