Augmented Democracy: Artificial Intelligence as a Tool to Fight Disinformation

One of the principles of digital democracy is to actively inform citizens and mobilize them to participate in the political debate. This paper introduces a tool that processes public political documents to make information accessible to citizens and specific professional groups. In particular, we investigate and develop artificial intelligence techniques for text mining from the Portuguese Diário da Assembleia da República to partition, analyze, extract and synthesize information contained in the minutes of parliamentary sessions. We also developed dashboards to show the extracted information in a simple and visual way, such as summaries of speeches and topics discussed. Our main objective is to increase transparency and accountability between elected officials and voters, rather than characterizing political behavior.

KEYWORDS:
Digital democracy; Natural language processing; Artificial Intelligence; Legislative information

Authorship

Alexandre Alcoforado

Alexandre Alcoforado is a M.Sc. student in Computer Engineering at Escola Politécnica da Universidade de São Paulo, and is an Electrical Engineer from the same institution.

Universidade de São Paulo, Escola Politécnica, São Paulo, Brasil. alexandre.alcoforado@usp.br; enzobustos@usp.br; andre.seidel@usp.br; rodrigo.gerber@usp.br; israelfama@usp.br; levy.siqueira@usp.br; anna.reali@usp.br Universidade de São Paulo, Escola Politécnica, São Paulo, Brasil. alexandre.alcoforado@usp.br; enzobustos@usp.br; andre.seidel@usp.br; rodrigo.gerber@usp.br; israelfama@usp.br; levy.siqueira@usp.br; anna.reali@usp.br Universidade de São Paulo, Escola Politécnica, São Paulo, Brasil. alexandre.alcoforado@usp.br; enzobustos@usp.br; andre.seidel@usp.br; rodrigo.gerber@usp.br; israelfama@usp.br; levy.siqueira@usp.br; anna.reali@usp.br

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3184-1534

Thomas Palmeira Ferraz

Thomas Palmeira Ferraz is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Télécom Paris and École Polytechnique, Institut Polytechnique de Paris. He is an Engineer from Escola Politécnica da Universidade de São Paulo (USP) and a Master of Applied Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence from École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay (ENS).

Telécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, Palaiseau, França. thomas.palmeira@telecom-paris.fr Telécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, Palaiseau, França. thomas.palmeira@telecom-paris.fr Telécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, Palaiseau, França. thomas.palmeira@telecom-paris.fr

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5385-9164

Enzo Bustos

Enzo Bustos is an undergraduate student in Electrical Engineering with an emphasis in Computing at Universidade de São Paulo.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3169-4469

André Seidel Oliveira

André Seidel Oliveira has a M.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering at Escola Politécnica da Universidade de São Paulo.

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6551-6911

Rodrigo Gerber

Rodrigo Gerber is an Electrical Engineer from Escola Politécnica da Universidade de São Paulo.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8120-7972

Gian Lucca du Mont Santoro

Gian Lucca du Mont Santoro is an undergraduate student in Applied and Computational Mathematics (with a qualification in Economic Statistics) at Instituto de Matemática e Estatística da Universidade de São Paulo and a Data Scientist at Itaú Unibanco.

Universidade de São Paulo, Instituto de Matemática e Estatística, São Paulo, Brasil. gian.santoro@usp.brUniversidade de São Paulo, Instituto de Matemática e Estatística, São Paulo, Brasil. gian.santoro@usp.brUniversidade de São Paulo, Instituto de Matemática e Estatística, São Paulo, Brasil. gian.santoro@usp.br

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6731-7940

Israel Campos Fama

Israel Campos Fama is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Engineering at Escola Politécnica da Universidade de São Paulo. He holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Universidade Federal do Ceará (UFC) and a M.Sc. degree in Aeronautical Engineering from the Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica (ITA).

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6325-4153

Bruno Miguel Veloso

Bruno Veloso is currently an Auxiliar Professor at Faculty of Economics - University of Porto. He is a Senior Researcher at LIAAD/INESC TEC and member of the Spanish association for artificial intelligence.

Universidade do Porto e INESC TEC, Porto, Portugal. bruno.m.veloso@inesctec.pt Universidade do Porto e INESC TEC, Porto, Portugal. bruno.m.veloso@inesctec.pt Universidade do Porto e INESC TEC, Porto, Portugal. bruno.m.veloso@inesctec.pt

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7980-0972

Fábio Levy Siqueira

Fábio Levy Siqueira holds a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering at Escola Politécnica da Universidade de São Paulo, He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer and Digital Systems Engineering at Escola Politécnica da Universidade de São Paulo.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7550-2000

Anna Helena Reali Costa

Anna Helena Reali Costa is a Full Professor in Computer Engineering at Universidade de São Paulo (USP). She took her Ph.D. at USP and was a guest researcher at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, and Carnegie Mellon University, USA. She is the Director of the Data Science Center (C2D), a partnership between USP and the Itaú-Unibanco bank, and a member of the USP-FAPESP-IBM Center for Artificial Intelligence (C4AI). Her scientific contributions lie in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7309-4528

SCIMAGO INSTITUTIONS RANKINGS

Figures

Figures (6)

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Figure 1
Gazette of the Assembly of the Republic (DAR, from “Diário da Assembleia da República”, in Portuguese)

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Figure 2
General scheme of the proposed tool and its respective functionalities: (i) Computation of direct or indirect citations; (ii) Classification of topics and themes covered in the minutes; and (iii) Automatic summarization of parts of the minutes of interest. These functionalities access a database generated from the DAR minutes and the initiatives discussed in the parliament sessions. Results are shown in a user interaction interface.

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Figure 3
Histograms of direct and indirect citations of derivatives of the word “corruption” (“corrupção” in Portuguese) in the period from 09/16/2020 to 02/25/2021. Top: Citations by parliamentarians (only the ten most cited). Bottom: Citations by party.

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Figure 4
Topics found (only the 12 most frequent topics), along with their most representative words (only the three most representative). Above the bars is the theme associated with each specific topic (only the most representative theme), from 09/16/2020 to 02/25/2021. Results are in Portuguese.

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Figure 5
The summary of an initiative report is generated from texts initially translated from Portuguese to English by the M2M100 translator, followed by the PEGASUS English summarizer and finally translated back to Portuguese, generating short summaries.

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Figure 6
Summary example: on the left is the part of a minute that was summarized in the figure on the right.

Figure 1 Gazette of the Assembly of the Republic (DAR, from “Diário da Assembleia da República”, in Portuguese)