We are pleased that Laura Mark is part of the aforementioned working group and can discuss our research with colleagues. Practitioners and researchers meet regularly in the working group to discuss various topics related to mobility and social inclusion. The working group started in the middle of 2021 and the content-related work is now taking more and more shape: Areas of interface with our research include the question of procedural justice in planning processes for the mobility transition – who participates and whose voices are heard? How should planning and participation processes for a sustainable mobility transition be designed in the future in order to include everyone? Here we will report on the further work and publications and events that develop within the context of this working group!
Category: research areas
Robust Methods for Classifying Argument Components in Public Participation Processes for Mobility Planning
In this publication in the Workshop on Argument Mining, Julia Romberg and Stefan Conrad address the robustness of classification algorithms for argument mining to build reliable models that generalize across datasets.
Abstract
Public participation processes allow citizens to engage in municipal decision-making processes by expressing their opinions on specific issues. Municipalities often only have limited resources to analyze a possibly large amount of textual contributions that need to be evaluated in a timely and detailed manner. Automated support for the evaluation is therefore essential, e.g. to analyze arguments.
In this paper, we address (A) the identification of argumentative discourse units and (B) their classification as major position or premise in German public participation processes. The objective of our work is to make argument mining viable for use in municipalities. We compare different argument mining approaches and develop a generic model that can successfully detect argument structures in different datasets of mobility-related urban planning. We introduce a new data corpus comprising five public participation processes. In our evaluation, we achieve high macro F1 scores (0.76 – 0.80 for the identification of argumentative units; 0.86 – 0.93 for their classification) on all datasets. Additionally, we improve previous results for the classification of argumentative units on a similar German online participation dataset.
Key findings
- We conducted a comprehensive evaluation of machine learning methods across five public participation process in German municipalities that differ in format (online participation platforms and questionnaires) and process subject.
- BERT surpasses previously published argument mining approaches for public participation processes on German data for both tasks, reaching macro F1 scores of 0.76 – 0.80 for the identification of argumentative units and macro F1 scores of 0.86 – 0.93 for their classification.
- In a cross-dataset evaluation, BERT models trained on one dataset can recognize argument structures in other public participation datasets (which were not part of the training) with comparable goodness of fit.
- Such model robustness across datasets is an important step towards the practical application of argument mining in municipalities.
Publication
Romberg, Julia; Conrad, Stefan (2021, November). Citizen Involvement in Urban Planning – How Can Municipalities Be Supported in Evaluating Public Participation Processes for Mobility Transitions?. In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Argument Mining (pp. 89-99), Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics. https://aclanthology.org/2021.argmining-1.9
Interdisciplinary course on exploring social status and language
This term we are offering a master course in which we use proposals from online consultation processes in conjunction with individual-level survey data to analyse if social status of participants is reflected in the language they use in their written proposals. To this end, we utilize AI-based methods of Natural Language Processing.
More information is available in German.
New seminar: Mobility and sustainability: Social aspects of the mobility turn
This term we offer a MA-course on “Mobility and sustainability: Social aspects of the mobility turn”. More information are available in German.
Results of the first practical workshop of the junior research group CIMT
Our first practical workshop in summer 2020 focused on the question of how the evaluation of citizen contributions can be technically supported and what requirements practitioners have for a software solution designed to (partially) automate the evaluation.
More information can be found in the working paper (German version only!):