  Modern democracies face a critical issue of declining citizen participation
in decision-making. Online discussion forums are an important avenue for
enhancing citizen participation. This thesis proposal 1) identifies the
challenges involved in facilitating large-scale online discussions with Natural
Language Processing (NLP), 2) suggests solutions to these challenges by
incorporating hybrid human-AI technologies, and 3) investigates what these
technologies can reveal about individual perspectives in online discussions. We
propose a three-layered hierarchy for representing perspectives that can be
obtained by a mixture of human intelligence and large language models. We
illustrate how these representations can draw insights into the diversity of
perspectives and allow us to investigate interactions in online discussions.
