Paper-Presentation at ICECCME 2024
In early November, our colleague Christoph Gassner presented the publication “Towards Goal-Oriented Volunteering – LLMs to the Rescue?” at the 4th International Conference on Electrical, Computer, Communications, and Mechatronics Engineering (ICECCME). This work was developed as part of our CIvolunteer project.
The sustainability of the volunteer sector is increasingly at risk—partly due to demographic changes—despite the United Nations (UN) identifying volunteers as key actors in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) outlined in the 2030 Agenda. In Austria, where a significant portion of critical infrastructure relies on volunteer work, this development poses a serious threat to the operational capabilities of many organizations. The CIvolunteer project aims to strengthen the volunteer sector and ensure that volunteers are sustainably matched with organizations, taking their individual preferences into account.
The presented study examines the relationship between volunteers’ personal goals and suitable activities. In the first step, we analyzed the nature of personal goals and volunteer activities across various leading regional, national, and international platforms. The objective was to develop methods to identify activities that align with defined goals. Due to the unstructured nature of the available textual data, large language models (LLMs) were employed to establish connections between volunteers’ goals and available activities. To improve computational efficiency, we also investigated whether a pre-trained Cross-Encoder model could be adapted for this classification task using LLM-generated data. The resulting models were evaluated using standard metrics, descriptive statistics, and statistical tests to assess and quantify differences between the models.
This work makes a significant contribution to leveraging modern AI technologies to develop sustainable solutions for the volunteer sector.
Find the conference proceedings here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/conhome/1843644/all-proceedings