The project addresses one of the key barriers to democratic participation, namely, the systematic exclusion of certain groups from political processes. Whether understood as “external exclusion” (lack of access to political discussion) or “internal exclusion” (lack of real impact on the outcomes of political discussion in which one participates), such communicative injustices disproportionally affect members of cultural and linguistic minorities. As highlighted, e.g., by the Conference on the Future of Europe, linguistic and cultural barriers exacerbate siloed thinking and the lack of diversity in dialogue around issues of international relevance, creating “areas” of thinking entrenched into national and language gates and hindering the creation of a truly European public sphere. The research and innovation roadmap of the MultiPoD project aims to radically improve the political dialogue at the European level through evolving knowledge graphs and generative, Artificial Intelligence-driven technologies that mobilise collective intelligence, bridge existing communication barriers, and yield a better understanding of the interdependencies between participatory processes, policy decisions and behavioural, thought and argumentation patterns in the public deliberation of international affairs. For this purpose, MultiPoD brings together experienced use case partners, as well as European networks engaged in fostering participatory, deliberative democratic processes, technology partners with a strong track record in multilingual language processing, and leading research partners specialised in collective intelligence, argumentation theory, human-computer interaction and visual methods for supporting and analysing online communication.

The team of the NOVA University will make use of the members’ philosophical and linguistic expertise in the areas of argumentation theory, philosophy of language, and political philosophy (IFILNOVA), as well as computational linguistics (CLUNL) to contribute to the project in several theoretical and empirical ways. Their guiding assumption is that the barriers to inclusive democratic deliberation are not primarily problems of linguistic competence, as modern tools for automated translation (eTranslation, Google Translate, DeepL) 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 exacerbate and reinforce other forms of epistemic and communicative injustices affecting underprivileged minorities. In order to better understand such challenges to multicultural argumentation, NOVA researchers will engage both in conceptual refinement and empirical study to provide new methods and tools for implicit premise reconstruction and for advanced fallacy recognition. In collaboration with the argumentation and deliberation technology partners from across Europe, they will advance consistent argumentation labelling and visualisation during political debates. Overall, they will provide insights on and some tested solutions to linguistic and cultural barriers to communication and mutual understanding and respect, thus limiting the negative impact of the contexts of social, linguistic, and cultural microcosms on inclusive argumentation and deliberation.