A Corpus of German Citizen Contributions in Mobility Planning: Supporting Evaluation Through Multidimensional Classification

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), pages 2874–2883 Marseille, 20-25 June 2022 © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 2874 A Corpus of German Citizen Contributions in Mobility Planning: Supporting Evaluation Through Multidimensional Classification Julia Romberg, Laura Mark, Tobias Escher Heinrich Heine University D¨usseldorf Universit¨atsstraße 1, 40225 D¨usseldorf {julia.romberg, laura.mark, tobias.escher}@hhu.de Abstract Political authorities in democratic countries regularly consult the public in order to allow citizens to voice their ideas and concerns on specific issues. When trying to evaluate the (often large number of) contributions by the public in order to inform decision-making, authorities regularly face challenges due to restricted resources. We identify several tasks whose automated support can help in the evaluation of public participation. These are i) the recognition of arguments, more precisely premises and their conclusions, ii) the assessment of the concreteness of arguments, iii) the detection of textual descriptions of locations in order to assign citizens’ ideas to a spatial location, and iv) the thematic categorization of contributions. To enable future research efforts to develop techniques addressing these four tasks, we introduce the CIMT PartEval Corpus, a new publicly-available German-language corpus that includes several thousand citizen contributions from six mobility-related planning processes in five German municipalities. The corpus provides annotations for each of these tasks which have not been available in German for the domain of public participation before either at all or in this scope and variety. Keywords: public participation, argument mining, thematic categorization, location detection, spatial planning, mobil- ity 1. Introduction Public participation is the “practice of consulting and involving members of the public in the agenda-setting, decision-making, and policy-forming activities” (Rowe and Frewer (2004), p. 512). By enabling citizens to communicate their preferences on specific issues, it is an important element of representative democra- cies to improve responsiveness between the electorate and their representatives. While there is a debate about what role such consultative procedures can or indeed should play (Parry and Moyser, 1994), here we focus on the more practical issue of how to process and eval- uate the input of citizens once public authorities have chosen to engage in such consultations. This has be- come a more pressing issue because of concerns about declining public support for democratic actors and in- stitutions (Norris, 2011) as well as the easy availabil- ity of online forms of participation which has led to widespread use of public participation, regularly result- ing in large numbers of contributions from citizens. Processing the contributions from citizens poses signif- icant challenges for public authorities because norms of democratic equality and administrative justice de- mand that every single contribution is carefully eval- uated. While it is desirable that people participate in large numbers for increasing the acceptance and possi- bly the usefulness of the output, public administration (or the private companies tasked with evaluation) often lack personnel and time to deal with large quantities of unstructured citizen input (Arana-Catania et al., 2021; Aitamurto et al., 2016; Simonofski et al., 2021). As …

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