Artificial Intelligence and Opinion Polling

Civic Technology Community Group,

Hello. I would like to share some more artificial intelligence and civic technology ideas with the group.

Artificial intelligence systems, virtual opinion pollsters, can perform structured, semi-structured, and unstructured surveys, questionnaires, and interviews across a number of communication channels (e.g., Web-based chatbots, email, telephone, Microsoft Teams, Skype, Facebook, Slack, Kik, Telegram, Line, GroupMe, Twilio, WebEx, WhatsApp, Zoom, RingCentral, etc.).

Recent advancements to artificial intelligence and natural-language processing, e.g., text embeddings, are interesting to consider with respect to the advancement of opinion polling technologies. With natural-language processing, virtual opinion pollsters can perform open-ended questions [1], e.g., follow-up questions which might explore rationales, justifications, and argumentation of respondents' previous answers.

In addition to being able to perform predefined lists, or sequences, of questions, virtual opinion pollsters can traverse larger trees or graphs of questions, with paths branching, or varying, based upon respondents' answers.

Thank you. Any thoughts on these topics?


Best regards,
Adam Sobieski
http://www.phoster.com

[1] https://news.gallup.com/opinion/methodology/406922/natural-language-processing-aids-open-ended-questions.aspx
[2] https://news.gallup.com/opinion/methodology/233291/why-phone-web-survey-results-aren.aspx