Inclusive Democratic Engagement and Language Technologies in Europe

European Commission - Horizon Europe

The IDEAL project seeks to foster a European public space for citizen deliberation that transcends linguistic and cultural barriers, utilising automated language tools and social innovation approaches. IDEAL will develop a unique methodology to support effective deliberation in multicultural and multilingual contexts underpinned by an in-depth analysis of the European participatory landscape, the development of advanced AI-based tools and technologies, and rigorous testing in experimental field settings. Pilots will be undertaken in Greece, Belgium and Austria. At least four state languages and four non-national languages will be covered by the process and tools. IDEAL will leverage mechanisms of social innovation through design thinking, co-design, co-creation to deepen the scope and impact of its proposed methodology. Building on results from the Conference on the Future of Europe, deliberations will focus on issues related to European democracy, migration, health and wellbeing, jobs and social justice, public governance and the rule of law. IDEAL will further develop the Decidim deliberation platform functionality including multilingual evidence and open data for online multicultural training and support, backed up with real-time multilingual support services such as machine effective translation simplification and subtitling and reading aloud applications. For offline environments, a user-friendly mobile application to support access to available multi-cultural resources will be developed. Finally, IDEAL will support the participation and access to multilingual information in both modes through the development of a chatbot functionality embedded in the platform.