Developing and Validating Tools for the Automated Analysis and Enhancement of Online Discussions

Online discussions play a vital role in today's society and recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) demonstrate promising potential for analyzing and facilitating them. This paper proposes a comprehensive framework that involves developing NLP tools based on the latest advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), creating and automating measures to assess the quality of discussions, integrating these tools into online discussion platforms, and designing and implementing adequate experiments to evaluate their usefulness. We emphasize the importance of both user feedback and well-designed experiments to assess how the accelerated development of LLMs can contribute to society. By collaborating with various stakeholders in citizen science and deliberative democracy platforms, we seek to integrate our framework in a meaningful manner. Overall, our framework offers a roadmap for leveraging LLMs to enhance online discussions in a responsible and effective way.