Text Mining für Online-Partizipationsverfahren: Die Notwendigkeit einer maschinell unterstützten Auswertung [Text mining for online participation processes: The necessity of automatically supported evaluations]

In recent years cities and municipalities rely increasingly on online participation processes to involve their citizens in political decision-making processes. This paper opens by categorizing political online participation processes in Germany before focusing on one participation project in particular, namely the Tempelhofer Feld in Berlin. In addition, the problems of a manual analysis of text contributions from participation processes are outlined in order to highlight the necessity for automatically supported evaluations.We discuss problems and possible solutions in three areas of analysis: argument mining, topic extraction, and emotion mining. For argument mining, a suitable three-part argumentation model is discussed which is applied to the online participation process Tempelhofer Feld. Furthermore, word embeddings are being evaluated as features for a support vector machine tasked with the automated classification of argumentation components. Subsequently, we focus on topic extraction, which aims to provide a rough overview of the topics discussed in an online participation process, and present the results of two methods. The paper concludes with a discussion on possible applications of an automated recognition of emotions in the context of online participation processes