EU citizens regularly share their views on upcoming laws through platforms like Have Your Say. But much of that input gets lost in the noise: hard to read, harder to organize, and often inaccessible due to language barriers.
We explored whether AI could help.
The result is AskThePublic – a chatbot that helps people (including policymakers, researchers, and journalists) better understand what citizens are saying. It doesn’t replace consultation, but supports it by:
– summarizing feedback from different stakeholder groups
– translating across EU languages
– making it easier to explore by topic or region
This is just a first step, but the goal is simple: make citizen voices more visible, so decisions can be more inclusive, trustworthy, transparent.
This paper will be presented at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS 2026 in January.
Full paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2504.03287
Try the demo: askthepublic.eu
Kudos to the author team: Nils Messerschmidt, Kilian Sprenkamp, Amir Sartipi, Xiaohui Wu, Igor TCHAPPI, and Gilbert Fridgen
