Project description
Breaking language barriers to build democratic spaces
There are silenced voices in democratic spaces as millions of people struggle with language barriers and are excluded from key deliberative processes. In the EU alone, around 6 million individuals, and globally over 90 million, have difficulties reading, writing and comprehending language, which restricts their full participation in democracy. In this context, the EU-funded iDEM project aims to break these linguistic barriers and begin a new era of inclusive and participatory democratic spaces for marginalised communities. Specifically, the project will create next-generation multilingual models, automatically adapting texts to the needs of the people, and provide AI tools for unbiased communication. iDEM’s overall goal is to promote inclusivity and representation for marginalised groups.
Objective
Deliberative and participatory processes currently lack full legitimacy due to the exclusion and marginalisation of several vulnerable communities from democratic spaces. iDEM will address this issue in the context of marginalisation and exclusion of people who need support to fully be able to read, write and comprehend language (around six million individuals in the EU and over 90 million people globally). iDEM will lay the theoretical foundations for the analysis of current marginalisation from deliberative processes of diverse under-represented groups due to language skills and propose, implement, and evaluate inclusive deliberative and participatory spaces. It will adopt a user-centred approach for making participatory processes more accessible and inclusive, developing advanced natural language processing technologies and artificial intelligence to empower under-represented groups with tools to facilitate communication and dialog in democratic spaces. iDEM will co-create the next-generation multilingual models aimed at (1) detecting possible sources of problems in understanding messages and biases for several European languages and audiences, (2) automatically adapting texts in those languages to be accessible and unbiased for these audiences, (3) providing AI tools for enhancing the controllable generation of messages and discourses. iDEM will innovate democratic spaces with customised, user-centric technology enhancing the participation and representation of marginalised groups by providing unbiased and inclusive technology. To do so, iDEM will also build on the results of relevant past projects, and seek collaboration with related projects and relevant centres for democracy in Europe.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
You need to log in or register to use this function
Keywords
Programme(s)
Call for proposal
(opens in new window) HORIZON-CL2-2023-DEMOCRACY-01
See other projects for this callFunding Scheme
HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation ActionsCoordinator
08002 Barcelona
Spain