Augmented Democratic Deliberation: Can Conversational Agents Boost Deliberation in Social Media?

Online social media are currently perceived as the new means of providing a platform for participation among citizens. This comes at a time when people are led to alternative spaces of political expression as traditional channels become strained. New technologies appear to have a transformational potential that could lead to social change and achieve deeper and wider mobilisation in political processes. However, people still face challenges when seeking information, disseminating information, or engaging in online deliberation. Allowing every citizen to participate in discussions and thus influence the final decision requires countless interactions that take considerable amounts of time and energy. This process is cognitively demanding due to linguistic barriers or when the problems on the table are multidisciplinary. We envision in this blue sky paper the development of autonomous and intelligent conversational agents that can augment the deliberative capacities of citizens in social media. To implement our vision, we start by proposing an approach that quantifies deliberation in online argumentative discussions. Then, we propose a methodology to optimise deliberation across discussion threads. The proposed concept is expected to pave the way to a form of augmented democratic deliberation built on the cooperation of humans and conversational agents.