Agent-Based Crowd Discussion Support System and Its Societal Experiments

Abstract

Crowd-scale discussion platforms are receiving great attention as potential next-generation methods for democratic citizen platforms [1, 2, 5, 8]. One of the studies clarified the critical problem faced by human facilitators caused by the difficulty of facilitating large-scale online discussions. In order to address this issue, we implement an automated facilitation agent to manage crowd-scale online discussions. An automated facilitator agent extracts the discussion structure from the texts posted in discussions by people. We conduct large-scale social experiments with several cities including Nagoya city in Japan, and the Kabul city in Afganistan. In this demonstration, we present our current implementation of D-agree, a crowd-scale discussion support system based on an automated facilitation agent, and some results on social experiments.