Multilingual and Multicultural Spaces for Political Deliberation

As highlighted by the Conference on the Future of Europe, EU citizens at large feel that the interplay between national media discourse and political/cultural contexts affects the perceptions and reactions to global events differently.

Language barriers exacerbate siloed thinking, the bandwagon effect, group thinking, and the lack of diversity in dialogue around issues of international relevance, creating “areas” of thinking entrenched into national and language gates and hindering the creation of a truly European public sphere.

Such challenges to democratic participation disproportionally affect members of cultural and linguistic minorities within and across EU member states.

The research and innovation roadmap of the MultiPoD project aims to radically improve the political dialogue at the European level through evolving knowledge graphs and generative, Artificial Intelligence-driven technologies that mobilise collective intelligence, bridge existing communication barriers, and yield a better understanding of the interdependencies between participatory processes, policy decisions and behavioural, thought and argumentation patterns in the public deliberation of international affairs.

For this purpose, MultiPoD brings together experienced use case partners, as well as European networks engaged in fostering participatory, deliberative democratic processes, technology partners with a strong track record in multilingual language processing, and leading research partners, specialised in collective intelligence, argumentation theory, human-computer interaction and visual methods for supporting and analysing online communication.