Facilitating automated online consensus building through parallel thinking

Abstract

Consensus building is inherently challenging due to the diverse opinions held by stakeholders. Effective facilitation is crucial to support the consensus building process and enable efficient group decision making. However, the effectiveness of facilitation is often constrained by human factors such as limited experience and scalability. In this research, we propose a Parallel Thinking-based Facilitation Agent (PTFA) that facilitates online, text-based consensus building processes. The PTFA automatically collects textual posts and leverages large language models (LLMs) to perform all of the six distinct roles of the well-established Six Thinking Hats technique in parallel thinking. To illustrate the potential of PTFA, a pilot study was carried out and PTFA's ability in idea generation, emotional probing, and deeper analysis of ideas was demonstrated. Furthermore, a comprehensive dataset that contains not only the conversational content among the participants but also between the participants and the agent is constructed for future study.

More information

Identifiers

ORCID for Zhaoxing Li: orcid.org/0000-0003-3560-3461

ORCID for Jan Buermann: orcid.org/0000-0002-4981-6137

ORCID for Jim Dilkes: orcid.org/0000-0002-5158-4611

ORCID for Vahid Yazdanpanah: orcid.org/0000-0002-4468-6193

ORCID for Sebastian Stein: orcid.org/0000-0003-2858-8857

Catalogue record

Export record

Altmetrics