The EPICA project exploits the state of the art in Computational Argumentation (CA) and Public Interest Communication (PIC) to bridge the two fields. This synergy will enable cross- fertilization and push mutual development, as illustrated by the analysis of their state of the art.
CA has become a major topic of investigation in artificial intelligence since seminal works from the 90’s [SIMLOU92, DUN95]. It develops formal models, amenable to computer implementation, of the multi-faceted activity of argumentation, a distinctive trait of human intelligence. In particular, it addresses one of the main forms of argumentation, i.e. the exchange of claims and relevant reasons in a communication context [PRA06]. The CA field has grown significantly in the past years producing a large corpus of results on models at various levels of abstraction, like abstract argumentation frameworks [DUN95] and structured argumentation formalisms [BESal14]. The latter allow to subsume approaches from traditional argumentation theory such as argumentation schemes [WALal08]. The main focus of CA is the acceptability of arguments in a debate, investigated by means of weighted, trust- based, and probabilistic models [FAZal19], and various aspects of argumentation dynamics [DOUMAI18].
Advancements on the theoretical side have been accompanied by the development of a variety of software tools, including automated reasoners and solvers [CERal18a], interactive tools for visualization and analysis [KIRal03], and interfaces facilitating participation in structured dialogues [ATKal06]. Recently, the problem of extracting argumentative structures from natural language sources, called argument mining, has been tackled with remarkable achievements [LAWREE19].
Such theoretical and computational underpinnings endow CA with the capacity to provide significant contributions to a challenging application domain like institutional PIC.
Effective institutional communication is essential for democratic decision-making [HAB09] since it ensures the stakeholders' legitimacy and clarifies the reasons behind policies affecting the collectivity. However, the motivations of such policies are sometimes not properly articulated, thus jeopardizing the implementation of PIC campaigns. Well-known risks connected with such faults (fake news, conspiracy theories) can be contrasted by securing specific properties that communication should display. These concerns inform the consolidated discipline of health communication [BER04], which focuses on disseminating health information and literacy. From a more general standpoint, the emerging field of PIC [CHR17] studies public interest campaigns, activism, and communication for the common good. Science communication is generally devoted to increasing awareness about scientific findings, providing arguments for decision making and political thinking. In this respect, the need for an argumentative partnership concerning the human, social and environmental implications of research has been advocated [GREMOR14], so that laypersons can assess the argumentation underlying expert opinions.
The theoretical categories of CA can be applied to institutional PIC at various levels, e.g. to highlight incoherencies and lack of explicit premises in existing policies and campaigns and to help stakeholders to manage future communication. According to [LAB15], argumentation theory can be used to analyze, predict, and improve the communicative interaction in public health, while [SCHal95] suggests that argumentative communication can be evaluated w.r.t. to a set of principles to verify the respect of a property of 'argumentational integrity'. Actually, it appears that argumentative properties like coherence or persuasiveness have a key role in the perception and public acceptance of PIC, as suggested by a 'coherence ranking' of the positions of some well-known medical experts during the pandemic, popularized by a national newspaper [NAD20]. The notion of coherence underlying this ranking has not been disclosed, which stresses the need of transparent definitions in such a critical matter.
While, as discussed above, the use of argumentative notions in public communication contexts has been advocated by several scholars and appears to have a high potential, it turns out that bridging argumentation and public communication has received relatively limited attention up to now. To exemplify, no work connecting argumentation and PIC can be found in the relevant journal [JPIC], while some works in the health area are mainly devoted to personal communications to patients [LABSCH14]. The role of argumentation during the pandemic is the subject of a recent book [OSWal22] that is focused however on informal, rather than formal and computational, argumentative models. Hence investigating the potential of CA to empower institutional PIC appears to be a largely unexplored research avenue: filling this gap is the main aspiration behind the EPICA project.
The EPICA project addresses the following central question: “How and at which extent can Computational Argumentation (CA) empower institutional Public Interest Communications (PIC)?”
This general question arises naturally from the analysis of the state of the art and involves, in more detail, the following sub-questions:
Accordingly, the project's research effort will be articulated in four main activities, described in the following, which tackle the research questions listed above.
A constant effort of outreach and dissemination will represent the fifth main activity of the project.
This activity will aim to draw a comprehensive conceptual analysis to identify elements of institutional PIC activities that can benefit from advanced CA techniques. Accordingly, requirements for the formalization of advanced argumentation models will be defined, and examples of use cases will be identified, providing inputs to the subsequent project activities. We plan to involve stakeholders representing the potential final users of the project results in the analysis and definition of requirements. To this purpose we will organize some focused co-production workshops, namely small scale events, gathering professional and academic experts in order to bring together their viewpoints and integrate the users’ perspective into the project since the early phases. The strategy to involve stakeholders in the project is described in point 5.
Several aspects of the state of the art in different fields will be analyzed in detail and linked together to build a comprehensive basis for the development of the project. The common trait driving the analysis will be the need to examine, understand, and support the standard outputs of a communication plan that we call “communication tracks”, i.e., sets of temporally marked communications pertaining to a given topic and coming from a single source, typically an institution. A communication track can hence be understood as representing the evolution over time of the publicly expressed positions of a given source about a given topic. Communication tracks of different sources can be regarded as an ecosystem of entities mutually influencing each other. Moreover, communication tracks are affected by the occurrence of significant events pertaining to their topic. It follows that analyzing communication tracks from different perspectives is crucial for studying how different sources deal with their communication goals in front of external events and other subjects. To build a project-level vision on communication tracks and to define requirements and use cases based on it, the following aspects of the state of the art in different but related fields will be examined.
* Analysis of existing rules and best practices concerning communication to the public: Examples include the community rules and scrutiny activities in social media [TW21, FB21] and EU best practices [EU18]. A preliminary examination reveals that many of these prescriptions or recommendations have a (sometimes implicit) argumentative nature (e.g. they admit exceptions and conflicts) and hence may benefit from a reappraisal based on an argumentative perspective. This reappraisal will be carried out using existing argumentation formalisms and possibly extending them to the needs of the PIC domain. In more detail, we plan first to devise a set of general argumentation schemes applicable in this context, then to identify instances of these schemes in the state of the art prescriptions. Finally, we will provide requirements for the representation and management of these schemes at a more formal level, as an input to the activity of formal modelling.
* Argumentative analysis of communication tracks over time: A preliminary examination of the state of the art suggests that, in the CA field, attention has been mainly devoted to modelling short-term dialogues [MCBPAR09]. Though providing a useful starting point, these models are not adequate to the needs of the long-term communication activities the project focuses on. In particular, basic notions like coherence may need different characterizations over different time spans: while a radical change of opinion can be regarded as a sign of incoherence in short-term, adaptation to new situations is definitely needed in the long-term, where a fixed position can be regarded as a lack of responsiveness and flexibility. To address these needs, some actual examples of PIC tracks will be analyzed to identify, at a high level of abstraction, the argumentative patterns adopted over time by some institutions and their strategies in response to external events and/or to the reactions of other subjects.
One promising example concerns national campaigns aiming at contrasting drug abuse. For example, the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign conducted during 1998-2004 by the Office of National Drug Control Policy in the US is a famous case of unsuccessful PIC [HOR08]. The campaign main goal was reducing and preventing drug abuse among young people, but after evaluation through a national panel, it was clear that teenagers exposed to federal anti-drug ads were no less likely to use drugs for having viewed them, and some young girls said they were even more likely to give drugs a try, resulting in a boomerang effect. The campaign is still ongoing, and communication changes after 2004 could be framed by theoretical categories defined in the project.
* Analysis of argumentation models and tools: An analysis of the state of the art in argument- based modelling of communication activities, with particular attention to the field of argumentation dynamics [DOUMAI18] will be carried out. A special focus will be devoted to the identification of general principles and desirable properties, which have been mostly considered up to now in short-term contexts [VANVES18]. The analysis will aim at evidencing both the reuse opportunities and the limitations of current models with respect to the needs of the project, thus identifying requirements for the advancements needed, to be developed in the formal modelling activity. As to argumentation tools, those available in the areas of argument visualization [KIR03], argument mining [LAWREE19], and automated argument generation [HUN20] will be surveyed to identify reuse and adaptation opportunities for the project purposes.
The outcomes of the above analyses will be the basis to identify requirements and guidelines for the activity of “Formal modelling”, described next.
This activity will aim at achieving theoretical and methodological advancements in CA by defining original models and properties useful to capture and analyze crucial aspects of institutional PIC. It will be driven by the outcomes produced by the activity of “Conceptual analysis and requirement definition” and will closely interact with the activity of “Model-based case analysis and model validation” in order to provide a foundation to the development of reasoning algorithms and validation tools.
To reach these objectives the activity will leverage on the rich asset of existing CA formalisms and will extend them with new developments according to the needs of the PIC field.
Current CA formalisms are able to capture several aspects of argumentation processes. In particular, different abstractions of the relations among sets of arguments have been considered, with the main goal of defining sound acceptance methods, called argumentation semantics [BARal11]. Either qualitative or quantitative notions of acceptance have been considered, also taking into account the possible presence of uncertainty. A basic notion of coherence in this context is represented by the property of conflict-freeness, i.e. the absence of conflicts within a set of arguments, while other more articulated principles, like defense and reinstatement [VANVES18], have been introduced. While these properties provide a rich starting point, it appears that they have been conceived without explicitly considering the diachronic dimension of argumentation. While this simplifying assumption is justified when focusing on temporally compact argumentation activities (e.g. short-term debates), it has to be lifted when considering institutional PIC activities over a long-term horizon.
The project will pursue this paradigm shift in modelling, which addresses the needs of PIC and also represents a remarkable opportunity of advancement for CA.
Already established formal notions like coherence, acceptability, persuasiveness will be revisited, while further specific formal notions will be introduced. Examples of possible novel properties to be considered include:
* communicativeness, that is the ability of being understood, which can be derived checking whether the reactions of the recipients of the communications are as expected;
* cogency, that is the property of claiming arguments whose premises are adherent to facts, and whose conclusions follow from premises through rigorous steps;
* openness, that is the property of taking into account other viewpoints when formulating arguments, e.g. by considering the attack or support relationships with the positions of other subjects.
Along these lines, a multifaceted characterization of long-term communication tracks based on a vector of argument-related properties will be defined.
The ultimate goal is to produce a sort of synthetic argumentative footprint, consisting of the values assigned to a communication track along the dimensions of this vector. This argumentative footprint will then be the basis for analysing a communication activity, comparing it with others, and providing support for next moves, as described in next points.
This activity, strictly connected to the previous one, will have the goal of enabling and experimenting the application of the proposed models to actual instances of PIC and then of verifying the validity of these models in practical cases.
First, a focused set of test cases will be identified. They will consist of publicly available institutional PIC instances, i.e. collections of press releases, posts on social media, and other forms of public announcement issued by an institution about a given topic of public interest over a significant time horizon (e.g. campaigns about vaccination by health authorities).
The first step will consist in bridging these natural language sources with the formal notions underlying the proposed models and hence enabling their application. To extract synthetic information, amenable to formal modelling, from natural language sources a twofold approach will be pursued.
First, existing Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques will be applied, ranging from the well-established tools for opinion mining and sentiment analysis, which may identify high- level features in a discourse, to argument mining techniques, which are able to segment texts into elementary argumentative discourse units, according to an annotation scheme.
It has to be acknowledged, however, that automated extraction techniques are still evolving and may not be able yet to support all the needs emerging from the project. For this reason, they will be complemented by an activity of manual annotation in order to generate a focused corpus of annotated texts suitable for the project. This will involve the work of independent annotators, then evaluated by standardized measures of inter-annotator agreement.
The focused dataset thus produced is meant to represent a contribution on its own, as it will be the first one to be built taking into account the diachronic perspective needed by the PIC domain. Moreover, it will stimulate advancements in automated extraction techniques, by bringing forward novel features deserving to be analysed. As mentioned also in point 1), we plan to consider, in particular, some past institutional PIC cases with a well identified characterization, e.g. recognized as definite successes or failures, as they can play the role of a sort of benchmark for the project. The inclusion of selected adversarial communication tracks, e.g. belonging to conspiracy theory, will also be considered.
As to sensible aspects such as access to linguistic resources and research data management on an openly accessible environment, the project will benefit from involvement in the Language Resources infrastructure for Social Sciences and Humanities (www.clarin.eu). The ILC-CNR, which participates in the project, is indeed the leader of its Italian consortium, CLARIN-IT (www.clarin-it.it) and hosts the ILC4CLARIN data centre (ilc4clarin.ilc.cnr.it).
The PIC cases included in the annotated dataset will be subjected to a focused analysis, based on the proposed formal models. This activity will aim at revealing the possible difficulties in the application of the proposed models to real cases and, in case they emerge, at providing feedback for their adaptation or refinement.
Then, the formal properties envisaged by the models will be validated in the considered cases to check whether the resulting argumentative footprint (as defined in point 2) satisfactorily meets the needs of the PIC field. In particular, it will be checked whether the produced argumentative footprint is informative, i.e. is able to evidence significant differences between alternative communication strategies, and actionable, i.e. whether it can be used to give suggestions to achieve some communication goals with further moves.
This validation activity will provide feedback to the formal modelling activity for model revision and refinement and, possibly, will also lead to a deeper rethinking at the level of the requirements identified in the activity of conceptual analysis. Altogether, these activities will provide the basis for the development of algorithms and validation tools, described next.
This activity will aim at defining and implementing reasoning algorithms based on the proposed models and at developing some validation tools at the level of proof of concept (TRL 3) for presenting the proposed approach to a selected set of users. Their feedback will be used in particular for a final assessment of the project and for identifying further research and development directions.
Assuming as input a suitably annotated communication track, algorithms for automatically generating its argumentative footprint and for deriving a formal representation (e.g. graph based) amenable to computer-based visualization to users will be investigated.
As to the development and implementation of the required reasoning algorithms, the project will leverage the rich availability of both algorithms and tools for CA, some of which have been developed by groups participating in the project. In particular we expect that adaptation and reuse of constraint-based, SAT-based, and probabilistic reasoning techniques, already successfully applied in the argumentation context, will enable the definition and implementation of the required algorithms with a reasonable effort.
Special attention will be devoted to scalability issues: while, due to its pioneering nature, the project will focus on PIC instances of limited size, we aim at ensuring that the proposed techniques are seamlessly applicable at a large scale. In this respect, the project will leverage the experience of some participants who contributed to the development of high- performance argumentation solvers able to efficiently deal with large scale (i.e. with tens of thousands of nodes) argumentation networks, as witnessed by the results achieved in various editions of ICCMA, the International Competition on Computational Models of Argumentation (argumentationcompetition.org).
Moreover, we will investigate the possibility of embedding the reasoning paradigm into a general language for modeling the interaction between agents. In this context, the user enters an input program describing the human/agent behaviour representing a communication track in a given time interval. Then, a simulation can be run, either all at once or step by step, returning an assessment of the agent's interaction, where the properties of interest (such as coherence/cogency/openness) are highlighted. To enhance the usability of the functionalities of this framework, we also plan to design a web interface integrating a state-of-the-art argumentation solver, which is invoked to solve reasoning tasks requiring a test of acceptability of arguments.
The reasoning algorithms developed will be the basis to deliver research-grade proof of concept tools (TRL3) that will be used for some evaluation tests with a restricted set of human participants to be recruited among some interested stakeholders (see point 5) and at the research units participating in the project.
This will provide an experimental basis for evaluating the project outcomes, comparing alternative solutions, as well as collecting feedback, requests for improvements, and suggestions for future research.
The user tests will be designed using as reference some real PIC scenarios and will consider some selected tasks like assessing the properties of a communication track on the basis of its argumentative footprint, comparing two (possibly adversarial) communication tracks, giving goal-driven suggestions on the next communication moves.
In developing the research-grade proof of concept, we will leverage the experience in current state-of-the-art argument-based software tools for the development of complex analysis activities, notably CISpaces [CERal18a]. Collaborative Intelligence Spaces (CISpaces) is a suite of tools and algorithms for the support of sense-making with evidence from various sources. CISpaces supports the process of sensemaking, complementing human expertise in the generation of a complex analysis. Building on top of CISpaces and leveraging ideas from other tools such as OVA+ [JANal14], we will build an experimental framework able to deliver a proof of concept of the advancements developed in the project. In this way, seamless integration and unified modelling will simplify the transition to a higher level of the TRL scale beyond the end of this project.
In particular, we expect to envisage the integration of our approach within current tools used by public and private institutions for social media management. This step can be regarded as an important goal for a subsequent application-oriented project, enabled by EPICA's expected seminal achievements and aimed at deploying in practice their full impact potential.
To favour these future developments and to ensure maximum reusability and modularity, we will privilege the current technologies in web services. This not only will simplify the testing of alternative proposals, but also will ease adoption in the community. Code will be shared using github, under the permissive MIT license.
EPICA project will encompass a constant outreach effort directed to the general public, the research community, and professional stakeholders. A variety of communication channels and dissemination methods will be used as described in the following.
The web site will be one of the main vehicles of the project ideas and results. It will provide a concise description emphasizing the uniqueness and benefits of the project in an accessible language so as to attract the attention both of experts in the relevant areas and of students and occasional visitors interested in learning more on the subject.
The website sections will include:
The project will create accounts on the main social media, such as Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. In addition to advertising public events and releases of material relevant to the project results, we will ensure regular updates, devoted to stimulating attention and promoting awareness on topics and events related to PIC and CA in general.
The project will promote the creation of local focus groups inviting professional stakeholders and additional academic experts. As mentioned in point 1, co-production workshops will be organized where stakeholders and academic experts will share their experience on the project topics, provide feedback on intermediate results, and, later, contribute to the evaluation of the proof-of-concept tools produced. Moreover, they will be invited to participate in public events, and suggest appropriate outreach initiatives.
Invitations will be individual and will be largely based on the network of acquaintances of the project participants and their institutions. In particular, the project will consider the following targets:
As a first step, during the proposal preparation we acquired the expression of interest by a relevant stakeholder, namely Comin & Partners, a strategic communication consulting company whose customers include the Italian ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Italian Conference of University Rectors, the Italian public radio and television broadcasting company, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and many multinational corporations.
At the latest stages of the project, a specific exploitation-oriented event open to any interested subject, in addition to the already involved stakeholders, will be organized. This will be crucial to identify the possible follow-ups of EPICA either in terms of further research (e.g. to set up consortia for EU project proposals) or of exploitation (e.g. to set up partnerships for continuing the development and experimentation of support tools implementing the approach developed in the project).
Publishing in international journals and attending and presenting at national and international events will be, as usual, valuable and effective instruments for disseminating the project results and assets within the academic community at large. In addition to the publications documenting project progresses and intermediate results, the production of a journal special issue connected to the final project event (see below) will be considered. An open access policy will be adopted for all the project publications and we will strive to ensure early availability through arxiv.
The project units will deliver press releases, tailored to local and regional newspapers and TV channels, to announce the beginning of the project and on occasion of main project events, indicatively on an annual basis as detailed in the following.
The project will organize the following main events:
All these events will be accompanied by press releases and will include dissemination activities open to the public, with the final workshop being fully devoted to this goal and supported by specific outreach initiatives, which we plan to define and implement in collaboration with the stakeholders involved in the project. To promote involvement of the research community and maximise the potential dissemination scope, we will strive to co- locate the project meetings and the final workshop with other scientific events relevant to the community at large, like well-established conferences and COST action meetings.
EPICA is a basic research project whose ultimate goal is unveiling the potential contribution of Computational Argumentation (CA) to empower Public Interest Communications (PIC). In this section we lay down the roadmap to scientific, societal, and technological impact for which EPICA will provide the fundamental, basic scientific advancements.
Starting from the scientific impact, which is expected in the nearest future, EPICA will advance the state-of-the-art in CA and PIC, certifying the world-leading role of Italian institutions in the field.
On the one hand, EPICA will produce a breakthrough in the state of the art in CA by developing new models and algorithms to cover the up-to-now overlooked diachronic and long-term aspects of argumentative discourse which are inherent to the PIC context. This will significantly extend the range of applications of CA by revealing to the international CA community the relevance and the importance of PIC thus paving the way to an impactful line of research in the field. In particular, we envisage further developments where the proposed models are applied, with possible adaptation, to various types of long-term communication activities. Consider for instance educational campaigns for cancer prevention, or environmental protection: existing research in public communication will inevitably be attracted by the results of EPICA and will benefit from its computational models that will ensure seamless standardisation and applicability.
ndeed, EPICA will promote a dramatic change in the PIC academic field: it will produce proof-of-concept tools illustrating some potential innovations in the conception, analysis, and management of PIC campaigns enabled by CA technologies and will thus stimulate reflections on how PIC can benefit from formal and technological advancements with particular reference to Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques. In spite of the huge progress in various strands of AI in recent years, this kind of research opportunity appears to have received very limited consideration up to now. When dealing with high-sensitive pieces of information, e.g. in the health and safety domain, and with a large spectrum of sensitivities in the audience, the AI approaches widely publicized in recent years will show several limitations: statistical learning from data averages all the nuances, resulting in products possibly discontenting each member of the audience. EPICA is uniquely placed to provide a game-changing view of what AI can do to serve the society at large. Due to its unconventional stance, aiming at having an impact in an area where big data is tremendously costly and unlikely to be generated, EPICA boldly faces the high-risks involved in its objectives, driven by its promises of remarkable rewards. EPICA’s consortium is composed of world leaders in the fundamental disciplines of computational argumentation, and computational linguistics, with a combined expertise that is unique on the international stage. Any remaining risk is then mitigated by the careful attention to the details in the project proposal, from the research question definitions, to the organization of units.
Thanks to its groundbreaking novelty and potential, EPICA will be the precursor of an intense strand of research proposals at international level. EU funding agencies have always acknowledged the transformational potential of CA technologies. The whole field of CA has been dramatically boosted by the EU-funded project ASPIC (STREP 2004-2007) which led to the development of novel formalisms which shaped the field and are still an active research subject and initiated the COMMA conference series. Subsequently the ARGUGRID project (STREP 2006-2009) investigated the use of CA technologies in the context of Service Oriented Architectures.
Argumentation was then one of the main topics of the Agreement Technologies initiative (COST Action 2009-2011) and of SINTELNET, the European Network for Social Intelligence (FET Coordination Action 2011-2014), both involving several participants of the EPICA project.
Several participants of the EPICA project also take part in the ongoing (2018-2022) COST Action APPLY, European Network for Argumentation and Public Policy Analysis, which is particularly relevant to the EPICA project. APPLY addresses the problem of using argumentation to improve the way European citizens understand, evaluate and contribute to public decision-making on such matters of common concern as climate change or energy policies. This is a companion and complementary research problem with respect to the one addressed by EPICA and testifies the interest of the EU in the potential of argumentation theory to address large-scale social issues. On the same line, though at a smaller scale, one of the EPICA participants was granted (2018-2020) the EDAPOL (Epistemic and Dynamic Aspects of Polarization) individual mobility fellowship for investigating social polarization phenomena from an argumentation theory perspective.
Coming to Horizon Europe, EPICA directly addresses the commission priorities for the 2019- 2024 period, starting from a European Green Deal, till a new push for European democracy. You cannot have a serious implementation of green policies without an effective, efficient, and digital public interest communication, and the same holds for the new push towards European democracy. It is straightforward to see that EPICA is also at the centre of the “Europe fit for the digital age” priority, and it can directly contribute too to the following goals: an economy that works for people; a stronger Europe in the world; and promoting our European way of life. Starting from the results EPICA will achieve at Italian level, and also taking into account the well-established research network of the consortium’s researchers and their international visibility, several EU project proposals extending and furthering the results of EPICA will be successful endeavours, thus strengthening the legacy of this high- risk/high-gain undertaking.
Concerning research infrastructures, as mentioned in section B1.2 EPICA will have access to the Language Resources infrastructure for Social Sciences and Humanities (www.clarin.eu), whose Italian consortium, CLARIN-IT (www.clarin-it.it) is coordinated by ILC-CNR, which participates in the project. It is expected that the datasets produced by the project will be made available to the community through this infrastructure, thus widening the potential impact on future research projects concerning related issues.
In the long-term, EPICA and its follow-up projects will empower institutions working towards the public interest with techniques and tools to deliver effective PIC campaigns. The potential social and economic impact of improved PIC is huge and essentially invaluable. In many cases, PIC is in fact life-critical. The full quotation from WHO briefly mentioned in Section A.10 of this proposal, clearly illustrates this: “Misinformation costs lives. Without the appropriate trust and correct information, diagnostic tests go unused, immunization campaigns (or campaigns to promote effective vaccines) will not meet their targets, and the virus will continue to thrive. Furthermore, disinformation is polarizing public debate on topics related to COVID-19; amplifying hate speech; heightening the risk of conflict, violence and human rights violations; and threatening long-terms prospects for advancing democracy, human rights and social cohesion.”
While, in last years, COVID-19 emergency provided a dramatic and pressing example of the paramount importance of an increased effectiveness of PIC in the health field, recently other crucial issues that require proper communication have started attracting public attention, like the problem of identifying appropriate nation-level and EU-level energy supply strategies in presence of a geopolitical crisis. More generally, in ordinary times, heated debates regularly arise on topics like big infrastructures (e.g. on TAV or MOSE in Italy), environmental issues (e.g. on countermeasures to climate change or, at a local scale, on waste management strategies), social organization policies (e.g. on taxation models or healthcare organization). Disinformation can be deleterious in all these contexts and may lead the public opinion to push forward suboptimal, if not detrimental, decisions, with huge social and economic costs.
Finally, also in the long-term, EPICA and its follow-up projects can promote a revolutionary change in corporate communication. By impacting the state-of-the-art in PIC, EPICA will also have an effect on how companies, from oil and gas enterprises to social media platforms, manage their communication to the wide public, ensuring quality, timeliness, and consistency. Indeed, we expect that companies will resort to the support tools enabled by EPICA to ensure that the socially responsible attributes and ethical values, which are pivotal to a particular corporate identity, are consistently revealed throughout the various communications of that organization to the public.
The expression of interest in the project provided during the proposal preparation by Comin & Partners, a major strategic communication consulting company, gives a confirmation of the expectations of stakeholders about EPICA's potential impact.
