CLUNL

MultiPoD – Multilingual and Multicultural Spaces for Political Deliberation Espaços Multilingues e Multiculturais para Deliberação Política

Identification

• Project identification: MultiPoD – Multilingual and Multicultural Spaces for Political Deliberation Espaços Multilingues e Multiculturais para Deliberação Política [101178821]
• Coordination: Arno Scharl (Weblyzard Technology Gmbh, Viena, Áustria)
• Responsible at no CLUNL: Raquel Amaro (Lexicology, Lexicography and Terminology research group)
• Start date: December 1, 2024
• Funding: HORIZON-CL2-2024-DEMOCRACY-01-10
• CORDIS: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101178821

Description

The project addresses the systematic exclusion of certain groups from political processes, a key barrier to democratic participation. This exclusion, whether “external” (lack of access to political discussion) or “internal” (lack of real impact on its outcomes), disproportionately affects cultural and linguistic minorities. As note by the Conference on the Future of Europe, linguistic and cultural barriers exacerbate siloed thinking and limit diversity in international dialogue, impeding a truly European public sphere. The MultiPoD project aims to enhance the European political dialogue through Artificial Intelligence-driven technologies that mobilise collective intelligence and bridge communication barriers. For this purpose, MultiPoD brings together experts in participatory, deliberative democratic processes, multilingual language processing, and collective intelligence, argumentation theory, human-computer interaction and visual methods for supporting and analysing online communication. NOVA’s team will contribute expertise in argumentation theory, philosophy of language, and political philosophy (IFILNOVA), and computational linguistics (CLUNL).
Barriers to inclusive democratic deliberation stem not just from problems of linguistic competence, as modern tools for machine translation significantly attenuate for them. Rather, the deeper challenges include implicit cultural knowledge, various argumentation styles, and differential understandings of what constitutes reasonable vs. fallacious argumentative discourse. These phenomena amplify epistemic and communicative injustices affecting minorities. NOVA researchers will contribute to refining concepts and conduct empirical studies to develop methods and tools for implicit premise reconstruction and fallacy recognition. These will provide insights on linguistic and cultural barriers to communication and mutual understanding and respect, limiting the negative impact of the contexts of social, linguistic, and cultural microcosms on inclusive argumentation and deliberation.

Consortium

Weblyzard Technology Gmbh (Coordinator)
NOVA University of Lisboa
Centre for Governance and Sustainability Studies – Ethos L
The Open University
Associació de Software Lliure Decidim
Open Source Politics
Storypact Gmbh
Kentro Merimnas Oikogeneias Kai Paidiou
Re-Imagine Europa

NOVA Team

Marcin Lewiński (IFILNOVA, PI)
Gabriele de Angelis (IFILNOVA)
Giulia Terzian (IFILNOVA)
+ 1 assistant researcher contract (IFILNOVA)
+ 1 post-doc fellow (IFILNOVA)
+ 1 PhD grant (IFILNOVA)
Raquel Amaro (CLUNL)
+ 1 PhD grant (CLUNL)