How to Streamline AI Application in Government? A Case Study on Citizen Participation in Germany

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are on the rise in almost every aspect of society, business and government. Especially in government, it is of interest how the application of AI can be streamlined: at least, in a controlled environment, in order to be able to evaluate potential (positive and negative) impact. Unfortunately, reuse in development of AI applications and their evaluation results lack interoperability and transferability. One potential remedy to this challenge would be to apply standardized artefacts: not only on a technical level, but also on an organization or semantic level. This paper presents findings from a qualitative explorative case study on online citizen participation in Germany that reveal insights on the current standardization level of AI applications. In order to provide an in-depth analysis, the research involves evaluation of two particular AI approaches to natural language processing. Our findings suggest that standardization artefacts for streamlining AI application exist predominantly on a technical level and are still limited.

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