Aiding the platform of decidim.barcelona: clustering of proposals

Abstract

Decidim Barcelona is an online participatory-democracy platform that boosts citizens participation to draw The Municipality Plan. A key step to build this plan is the selection of the proposals that will be included. This requires a manual selection and grouping of proposals that intend to tackle the same issue. The use of machine learning can speed up this process as well as improve user experience suggesting similar proposals, also decreasing the number of duplication. We have experimented several techniques to discover which one better solves the problem of automatically grouping similar proposals.