EU citizens regularly share their views on upcoming laws through platforms like Have Your Say. But much of that input gets lost in the noise: hard to read, harder to organize, and often inaccessible due to language barriers.

We explored whether AI could help.

The result is AskThePublic – a chatbot that helps people (including policymakers, researchers, and journalists) better understand what citizens are saying. It doesn’t replace consultation, but supports it by:
– summarizing feedback from different stakeholder groups
– translating across EU languages
– making it easier to explore by topic or region

This is just a first step, but the goal is simple: make citizen voices more visible, so decisions can be more inclusive, trustworthy, transparent.

This paper will be presented at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS 2026 in January.

📄 Full paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2504.03287
🌐 Try the demo: askthepublic.eu

Kudos to the author team: Nils Messerschmidt, Kilian Sprenkamp, Amir Sartipi, Xiaohui Wu, Igor TCHAPPI, and Gilbert Fridgen