Using language models to help people find common ground

Technology and democracy have a chequered history. I will talk an opportunity to use AI to help people find common ground. We trained system of large language models (LLMs) that received diverse written opinions on a potentially controversial issue to generate a written consensus statement that maximised endorsement from group members. We found that statements written by the LLM were endorsed more readily than those written by humans. When we measured group members' stance before and after the process, we found that afterwards consistently tended to converge on a common side of the argument. We used tools from NLP to study the properties of the consensus statement that made this possible. We then used the tool to run a virtual citizens' assembly.

Computational Linguistics Seminar

The CLS is the Computational Linguistics Seminar of the University of Amsterdam. Seminars are open to all interested researchers and students of all levels from UvA and elsewhere. The CLS is organized and sponsored by the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation's NLP and Digital Humanities research unit, and sponsored by the ELLIS Unit Amsterdam.

Contact

The seminar is organised by Jelke Bloem and Alina Leidinger.

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