Re: Artificial Intelligence and Opinion Polling

Mike,

Thank you for the pol.is hyperlinks. I like the quote in that article indicating that “we need to have a platform to allow the entire society to engage in rational discussion”. Like others, perhaps others in this group, I’ve put some thought into various ways that AI can enhance such platforms, forums, and discussions.

Also, people can utilize multiple such platforms simultaneously: human polling organizations, virtual opinion pollsters, Vocdoni, pol.is, opinion polls on social media, etc. There are, then, interesting matters to consider pertaining to the analysis, triangulation, and corroboration of data from multiple such sources, processes which secure and assure those data and resultant inferences.

I’m working towards ensuring that decentralized and secure opinion-polling solutions, e.g., Vocdoni, can support text-based inputs and JSON objects for survey items. With support for text-based survey items, questionnaire designers could: (1) provide “other, please specify” options for item choices, (2) request explanations, rationales, justifications, or arguments for responses to previous items, (3) request comments, questions, and other feedback, and (4) request other descriptions of, or details about, goods, products, and services.

On a UI/UX note, one can imagine scenarios where AI systems would display a green checkmark next to a textbox, or would highlight its border to green, whenever it could understand or process its text contents with a sufficient degree of confidence. Beyond uses of regular expressions to validate text values and unconstrained text values, this would be a third option for handling text-based input from respondents.


Best regards,
Adam

________________________________
From: Mike Gifford <mike.gifford@civicactions.com>
Sent: Friday, April 28, 2023 9:42 AM
To: public-civics@w3.org <public-civics@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Artificial Intelligence and Opinion Polling

Hey Adam,

When it comes to gauging public opinion, my preference is to skip polling and move right to solutions like https://pol.is/home


Taiwan has done some great work with this to help build on similarity rather than difference:
  https://blog.pol.is/pol-is-in-taiwan-da7570d372b5


There are likely ways to gain additional insights by applying ML to the content produced by citizens.

Being able to move beyond sentiment analysis to actually group and summarize free-form expressions of interest is certainly worth exploring. It may well allow for some more qualitative feedback, which is often missing from more numerical poling approaches.

I still wonder whether adding the BS & hallucinations from ML is going to get us further away from Benjamin Disraeli's "Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics".

Will it reinforce the bias that it has learned by scanning the last 100 years of human text?

There are risks in all of this, and not all algorithms or datasets are built to avoid bias.

Mike

On Thu, Apr 27, 2023 at 10:09 PM Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski@hotmail.com<mailto:adamsobieski@hotmail.com>> wrote:

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<mailto:adamsobieski@hotmail.com>>
Sent: Tuesday, April 25, 2023 3:59 AM
To: public-civics@w3.org<mailto:public-civics@w3.org> <public-civics@w3.org<mailto: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




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Mike Gifford, Senior Strategist, CivicActions
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