Re: Artificial Intelligence and Opinion Polling

Civic Technology Community Group,



Hello. I recently received some feedback on these ideas which underscored the importance of securing opinion-polling systems.

Firstly, virtual opinion pollsters could be those parties which initiate opinion polling processes, using telephone to call selected respondents, sending emails to selected respondents, and so forth, as opposed to traditional Web-based opinion polling where respondents initiate opinion polling processes (including in ways which might not be impervious to malicious actors or their bots). Anonymity in these types of systems, where virtual opinion pollsters initiate the processes, would, seemingly, require trusting the opinion-polling organizations using the AI tools.

Secondly, there exist solutions such as Vocdoni [3][4]. I’m looking, once more, at these types of technologies – which I think are designed for multiple-choice polls and voting – and considering whether or not they might be able to support more kinds of items including, but not limited to, open-ended natural-language questions.




Best regards,

Adam Sobieski


[3] https://vocdoni.io/

[4] https://blog.aragon.org/introducing-vocdoni-anonymous-voting/


________________________________
From: Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski@hotmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, April 25, 2023 3:59 AM
To: public-civics@w3.org <public-civics@w3.org>
Subject: 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