Publications

Nowadays, governments are adopting Web 2.0 technologies for interacting with citizens, empowering them to share their views, react to issues of their concern and form opinion. In particular, social media play an important role in this context, due to their widespread use. For governments, a major technical challenge is the lack of automated intelligent tools for processing citizens’ opinion in government social media. At the same time, during the last decade, argumentation theory has consolidated itself in Artificial Intelligence as a new paradigm for modeling common sense reasoning, with application in several areas, such as legal reasoning, multi-agent systems, and decision support systems, among others. This paper outlines an argument-based approach for overcoming such challenge, combined with context-based information retrieval. Our ultimate aim is to combine context-based search and argumentation in a collaborative framework for managing (retrieving and publishing) service- and policy-related information in  government-use social media tools.

 Social media is one of Web 2.0 tools that governments are adopting for interacting with citizens. Through their use, citizens are able to share their views, react to issues of their concern and form opinion. However, despite the infusion of such tools in citizens’ lives, governments face several challenges to fully benefit from their adoption. One technical challenge is the lack of automated intelligent tools for processing citizens’ opinion in government social media. This paper presents a project - DECIDE 2.0, focusing on the provision of a framework, including a software tool, for overcoming such challenge.  The aim of the project is to combine context-based search and argumentation in a collaborative framework for managing (retrieving and publishing) service- and policy-related information in government-use social media tools. For developing the framework, the research work is underpinned by artificial intelligence and software engineering techniques. The developed framework will be applied for the qualitative and quantitative assessment of citizens’ opinion on a specific policy issue. A pilot test of the framework is planned to be carried out in collaboration with a local government. The project is executed by two universities in Argentina and Mexico.