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.

现代民主面临公民参与度下降的关键问题。网络讨论论坛是增强公民参与的重要途径。该研究提议通过自然语言处理结合人工智能技术解决在线大规模讨论中的挑战，并研究这些技术能在在线讨论中揭示的个人观点。我们提出了一个由人工智能和大型语言模型组成的三层层级结构来表示观点，展示这些表示形式如何洞察观点的多样性以及允许我们研究在线讨论中的互动。

通过混合自然语言处理方法促进意见多样性

Facilitating Opinion Diversity through Hybrid NLP Approaches

Social-media platforms have created new ways for citizens to stay informed
and participate in public debates. However, to enable a healthy environment for
information sharing, social deliberation, and opinion formation, citizens need
to be exposed to sufficiently diverse viewpoints that challenge their
assumptions, instead of being trapped inside filter bubbles. In this paper, we
take a step in this direction and propose a novel approach to maximize the
diversity of exposure in a social network. We formulate the problem in the
context of information propagation, as a task of recommending a small number of
news articles to selected users. We propose a realistic setting where we take
into account content and user leanings, and the probability of further sharing
an article. This setting allows us to capture the balance between maximizing
the spread of information and ensuring the exposure of users to diverse
viewpoints.
The resulting problem can be cast as maximizing a monotone and submodular
function subject to a matroid constraint on the allocation of articles to
users. It is a challenging generalization of the influence maximization
problem. Yet, we are able to devise scalable approximation algorithms by
introducing a novel extension to the notion of random reverse-reachable sets.
We experimentally demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of our algorithm
on several real-world datasets.

本文提出了一个新方法来最大化社交网络中推荐新闻文章给特定用户的多样性，以确保用户暴露于不同的观点，而不是陷入过滤气泡。综合考虑用户性向、内容、分享概率等因素，该方法能够在保证信息传播最大化的同时实现多样性的平衡。作者通过引入新颖的随机可达集的概念扩展和以期约束来解决这个开放的挑战性问题，并设计了可扩展的近似算法。实验结果表明，该算法在多个真实世界的数据集上运行效率和可扩展性良好。