Online discussions can be rough, especially when it comes to political issues. They are often characterized by a harsh tone which discourages many people from participating in them at all. At the same time, these discussions are very important for democracy as they promote exchange and help individuals form their own opinions. While Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be detrimental to the quality of discussions (e.g. when used in spam bots), it also offers a promising opportunity to support constructive and inclusive discussions, for example by making them more civil. To strengthen such discursive integration we have engaged in a co-creation process with non-academic stakeholders to develop a discussion assistant prototype that i) identifies likely problematic comments for a possible rephrasing and ii) offers authors help with reformulation by letting generative AI suggest improvements like more civil wording. In this paper, we describe the process of co-creative research and the current status of the discussion assistant, which is still being developed and improved.

Political authorities in democratic countries regularly consult the public in order to allow citizens to voice their ideas and concerns on specific issues. When trying to evaluate the (often large number of) contributions by the public in order to inform decision-making, authorities regularly face challenges due to restricted resources. We identify several tasks whose automated support can help in the evaluation of public participation. These are i) the recognition of arguments, more precisely premises and their conclusions, ii) the assessment of the concreteness of arguments, iii) the detection of textual descriptions of locations in order to assign citizens’ ideas to a spatial location, and iv) the thematic categorization of contributions. To enable future research efforts to develop techniques addressing these four tasks, we introduce the CIMT PartEval Corpus, a new publicly-available German-language corpus that includes several thousand citizen contributions from six mobility-related planning processes in five German municipalities. The corpus provides annotations for each of these tasks which have not been available in German for the domain of public participation before either at all or in this scope and variety.