Opinion Polling Systems and Virtual Opinion Pollsters

Intelligent personal assistants (i.e. Cortana, Google Assistant, Siri) or other “bots” can schedule and perform opinion polls. Specialized artificial intelligence systems, opinion polling systems or virtual opinion pollsters, can be of use to opinion polling organizations, to news organizations and to governments.

Opinion polls open and close at certain points in time and opinion polling systems can schedule and coordinate large numbers of opinion polls with large numbers of respondents. Scheduling is envisioned as involving interactions with users, their intelligent personal assistants and calendar apps.

Modern dialog system frameworks support multiple channels of interaction, for instance Skype. Opinion polling systems can, while providing anonymity in terms of polling results, authenticate users including based upon biometrics.

Opinion polling systems can provide hyperlinks before or during opinion poll questions. Web browsing could become a part of modeling the contexts which occur as respondents complete questionnaires. Virtual opinion pollsters could also, in dialogs, answer questions which respondents might ask.

Virtual opinion pollsters can perform structured, semi-structured and unstructured interviews. Virtual opinion pollsters can perform open-ended questions, including follow-up questions which explore the rationales, justifications and argumentation of respondents’ previous answers, and can process their natural language responses. Virtual opinion pollsters can perform lists, trees or graphs of questions, paths varying based upon respondents’ answers. Virtual opinion pollsters can generate dynamic natural language dialogs in accordance with the best practices of survey methodology and questionnaire construction.

The software components of opinion polling systems can process human-generated questionnaires as well as other dialogs and transcripts to detect questionnaire construction issues, question sequence issues, question wording issues, and other similar issues with dialogs. Such components can also provide functionality for computer-aided questionnaire authoring tools.

Opinion polling systems and virtual opinion pollsters can facilitate large-scale group reasoning and decision-support systems, systems where reason prevails from inclusive and participatory processes.