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A new interview with Miklós Sebők has been published in the weekly magazine HVG. The conversation presents the latest developments of poltextLAB’s flagship project, the Babel machine (babel.poltextlab.com). Dr. Sebők highlighted the tool’s reliability, multilingual capabilities, and its potential to significantly facilitate legal and scientific workflows. The most important features were also discussed, such as automated analysis of legal texts and media content, multilingual text processing, and emotion recognition. The full interview is available HERE.

On May 10, 2025, Miklós Sebők gave a course on political economics at Milton Friedman University’s professional camp. During the course, students learned about the political economy of globalization and post-globalization.

On 8 May 2025, Miklós Sebők representing the Political Science Committee of Hungarian Academy of Sciences, participated in a roundtable at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA) as part of the event Digitalisation – Global Opportunities, Local Challenges, Scientific Responses. The event brought together experts from multiple disciplines, offering a comprehensive view of Hungary’s current practices and the potential for more effective digital policy design.

PoltextLAB is a host institution in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’ (MTA) newly launched Momentum-MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowship Programme (Momentum PPDF), through which we welcome applications for our V-SHIFT project. Co-funded by the European Commission and the Secretariat of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA), with the support of Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA), the programme supports 35 exceptional postdoctoral researchers, offering them the opportunity to work within Hungarian Momentum (Lendület) research groups. This initiative fosters career development in dynamic research environments while enhancing the international visibility of Momentum projects. Additionally, it strengthens Hungary’s R&D and innovation ecosystem and promotes interdisciplinary collaboration across disciplines and sectors. Our research team offers postdoctoral researchers joining the programme the opportunity to use state-of-the-art AI-based methods to investigate the emergence of global powers on the domestic policy agenda of the V4 countries and to analyse attitudes and changes in attitudes towards them. The fellowship lasts up to 36 months. The first round of applications opens on 2 April 2025. Our research team will host postdoctoral researchers until August 2028. For more details on the fellowship programme, please visit: https://momentummsca.mta.hu/

A new study by Rebeka Kiss and Miklós Sebők, titled “The concept of tailor-made laws and legislative backsliding in Central–Eastern Europe,” has been published in Comparative European Politics. The research examines ‘tailor-made laws’—legislation that codifies individual cases under the guise of general rules—and their role in legislative backsliding within Central–Eastern Europe. The authors argue that these laws, which directly or indirectly affect specific individuals or institutions, serve as empirical markers of the shift from liberal to illiberal democracies. Through case studies, they demonstrate how such laws are used to implement discretionary reward and punishment policies, potentially undermining the broader public interest. The full study is available here. Kiss, R., Sebők, M. (2025). The concept of tailor-made laws and legislative backsliding in Central–Eastern Europe. Comparative European Politics.

Miklós Sebők gave a presentation on making computational methods more accessible to a broader community at the Computational Communication Science Lab of the University of Vienna. In his talk, titled “Leveraging Large Language Models and Generative AI for Social Research: The Babel Machine Approach,” he introduced The Babel Machine toolkit and discussed the development of AI-supported research, as well as the unification of an otherwise fragmented research field in the social sciences. The presentation covered the application of generative AI in political and social science research, along with the effective use of advanced data analysis methods.  

Presentation by Miklós Sebők, director of poltextLAB, at the Portfolio Signature PRO investors’ club event titled “The Limits of Global AI Governance and Hungary’s Position in the Intensifying AI Race.” In his presentation, he discussed the AI competition between China and the USA, particularly developments in the field of language models, and their impact on Hungary. He highlighted the international challenges of AI governance and the shortcomings of regulatory frameworks that influence technological development and the competitiveness of nations. The event concluded with a panel discussion, where industry experts debated current investment strategies and the economic impacts of AI technology.