Political online participation in the form of discussing political issues and exchanging opinions among citizens is gaining importance with more and more formats being held digitally. To come to a decision, a thorough discussion and consideration of opinions and a civil exchange of arguments, which is defined as the act of deliberation, is desirable. The quality of discussions and participation processes in terms of their deliberativeness highly depends on the design of platforms and processes. To facilitate online communication for both participants and initiators, machine learning methods offer a lot of potential. In this work we want to showcase which issues occur in political online discussions and how machine learning can be used to counteract these issues and enhance deliberation. We conduct a literature review to (i) identify tasks that could potentially be solved by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to enhance individual aspects of deliberation in political online discussions, (ii) provide an overview on existing tools and platforms that are equipped with AI support and (iii) assess how well AI support currently works and where challenges remain.

翻译：以政治议题讨论和公民意见交流为形式的在线政治参与日益重要，且更多形式正在数字化开展。为达成决策，需要进行深入的讨论与意见考量，以及文明的论点交流——这被定义为审议行为。讨论与参与过程在审议性方面的质量高度依赖于平台与过程的设计。为促进参与者与发起者双方的在线交流，机器学习方法提供了巨大潜力。本文旨在阐述政治在线讨论中存在的问题，以及如何利用机器学习应对这些问题并提升审议质量。我们通过文献综述：（i）识别可通过人工智能算法解决的、用于增强政治在线讨论中审议各环节的任务；（ii）概述现有配备人工智能支持的工具与平台；（iii）评估当前人工智能支持的有效性及存在的挑战。