PoltextLAB is hiring a DATA ANALYST and a PROJECT RESEARCHER. If you are interested in joining a research lab that works with state-of-the-art AI methods to tackle the most relevant issues of social science, please follow the links: Data Analyst –> Project Researcher –> For more information, please reach out to us at lauraanna.seben@tk.hu.
The journal article by Ákos Máté, Miklós Sebők, Lukasz Wordliczek, Dariusz Stolicki and Ádám Feldmann has been published in Computational Communication Research on September 28, 2023, entitled “Machine Translation as an Underrated Ingredient? – Solving Classification Tasks with Large Language Models for Comparative Research.” The article is available here: https://doi.org/10.5117/CCR2023.2.6.MATE. The PDF version can be found here: https://www.aup-online.com/docserver/fulltext/26659085/5/2/CCR2023.2.6.MATE.pdf?expires=1695992371&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=4170BC037ED6EF84A42CFE9098A5E14E.
On September 26, Miklós Sebők received the grant award of the new Lendület (“Momentum”) research group at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The President of the Academy decided on 31 May 2023 on the ranking of excellence and the amounts of funding to be awarded to the research teams to be supported. As a result, a new Lendület (“Momentum”) research group was established at the Centre for Social Sciences (CSS), Budapest, led by Miklós Sebők. The five-year project, funded with over EUR 560 000, is entitled: “The changing global relations of the Visegrad countries in times of war – An artificial intelligence-assisted comparative analysis“. Dr Sebők is a research professor at the Institute of Political Science CSS, and the National Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence at CSS, as well as the principal investigator of poltextLAB (poltextlab.com), a research lab dedicated to text mining and artificial intelligence applications in the social sciences. The project will extend the lab’s machine learning-based analysis of public policy agendas to the history and current data sources of the Visegrad countries after 1990, with the help of the lab’s collaborators and national and international partners. Details on the Momentum research project of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences can be found here (in Hungarian): https://mta.hu/mta_hirei/a-bronzkortol-a-nanotechnologiaig-19-uj-lendulet-kutatocsoport-alakul-az-mta-tamogatasaval-112990.
We are happy to announce that we are organizing a workshop on 23-24 November 2023 at the Centre for Social Sciences, in Budapest. The workshop’s aim is to bring together scholars and hold data and method-related presentations with a focus on the legislature and the mainstream print/online media in Central and Eastern Europe. Duration: 1pm, November 23rd (Thursday), – 1pm, November 24th (Friday). Venue: Centre for Social Sciences, 4 Tóth Kálmán utca, Budapest 1097 (Google Maps). Target Audience: Both senior scholars and PhD/postdoctoral level participants. Participation: Accepted participants are expected to do a 10-minute presentation on their data and/or methodological work and serve as chairs/discussants. The application form is available here: https://forms.gle/5sciQDGAAKyS1NJy9. The abstract to be submitted should be no longer than 250 words. The submission deadline for proposals is September 30, 2023, 4 pm CET. Applicants will be notified on an ongoing basis, but no later than by October 6, 2023. You can find more details here.
On September 6, Ákos Máté presented the paper “Introducing the CAP BABEL MACHINE: A state-of-the-art AI solution for automated coding of policy agendas” at the 2023 General Conference of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) hosted by Charles University, Prague. Ákos Máté’s paper presentation took place in the Machine Learning and AI in Political Science panel, in the Advancements and Innovations in Research Design and Methods: New Conditions or New Challenges? section. The abstract of the paper is available here: https://ecpr.eu/Events/Event/PaperDetails/69814 The ECPR General Conference program is available here: https://ecpr.eu/Events/AcademicProgramme/Programme?EventID=214 If you are interested in the CAP Babel Machine, you can find it here: https://babel.poltextlab.com/
CALL FOR PAPERS Studying Central-Eastern European Politics in the Age of AI – A Workshop on Data and Methods Background and scope The aim of the workshop is to bring together a diverse group of political, policy, communication, and legal scholars as well as computational social scientists and linguists working on the data-centered analysis of the politics and international relations of Central-Eastern Europe (CEE). This regional scope mainly covers the four Visegrad countries, but work related to the Balkans, the Baltic states, Central European, and Eastern European countries will also be considered. We are particularly interested in presentations relying on a text-as-data framework (Cardie and Wilkerson, 2008; Monroe and Schrodt, 2008; Wilkerson and Casas, 2017; Grimmer and Stewart, 2013), and those applying cutting-edge quantitative and/or artificial intelligence-supported methodology to quantify and evaluate policy agendas in the region (see e.g. studies associated with the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP), following the research agenda presented in Baumgartner, Breunig, and Grossman (2019). Data presentations will mainly focus on collections featuring text data from 1990 on (although historical datasets will also be considered) including parliamentary, executive/presidential/government/policy documents, print, online, and social media, as well as archives related to the constitutional/legal agenda. Methods presentations will primarily review work related to the collection, hosting, cleaning/processing, and analysis (including machine learning and large language models) of textual data as well as linguistic issues concerning the region. Workshop details We invite scholars to submit their proposals related to data and methods-related presentations with a focus on Central-Eastern Europe. We are particularly interested in work on the relations between CEE countries and/or the EU, the U.S., China, and Russia named entity recognition targeted or aspect-based emotion analysis related to these named entities classification of policy topics Only submissions explicitly addressing the data collection and/or methodology of the research project will be assessed. We welcome presentations on ongoing projects and work-in-progress, as well as already published work and data repositories. The workshop is organized by poltextLAB (poltextlab.com) at the HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences, Budapest. Organising committee: Rebeka Kiss, Ákos Máté, Csaba Molnár, Orsolya Ring, Miklós Sebők. Duration: 1pm, November 23rd (Thursday), – 1pm, November 24th (Friday) Venue: Centre for Social Sciences, 4 Tóth Kálmán utca, Budapest 1097 (Google Maps) Target Audience: Both senior scholars and PhD/postdoctoral level participants Participation: Accepted participants are expected to do a 10-minute presentation on their data and/or methodological work and serve as chairs/discussants. The application form is available here: https://forms.gle/5sciQDGAAKyS1NJy9. The abstract to be submitted should be no longer than 250 words. The submission deadline for proposals is October 6, 2023. Applicants will be notified on an ongoing basis, but no later than October 13, 2023. The registration fee and the workshop dinner for all accepted presenters are kindly sponsored by our partners: HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences, MORES (Horizon Europe), V-SHIFT Momentum Research Group (Hungarian Academy of Sciences), the Artificial Intelligence National Laboratory of Hungary, the COMPTEXT Conference (comptextconference.org) and the Visegrád Fund. There are a limited number of travel grants available for one presenting author per paper for economy flights, train or bus rides, and for one night of accommodation. Please indicate on the submission form if you would like to be considered for the travel grant. Please keep in mind that we can offer a limited number of travel grants, and we apply a first come, first served policy for accepted proposals. For more details, please consult the PDF of the call. Please contact Laura Seben for additional information at lauraanna.seben@tk.hu.
On 31 July 2023, Rebeka Kiss attended the Conference on Data Science and Law, hosted by Fordham University (co-organised with ETH Zurich and the University of Virginia) in New York, where she presented her research entitled “How to quantify legal interpretation? Text mining approach with data from Hungary”. The conference’s purpose was to convene researchers across disciplines interested in the burgeoning field of Data Science and Law. Scholars from various backgrounds, including law, social and behavioural sciences, digital humanities, computer science, machine learning, and data analytics, were invited to present their works-in-progress in empirical legal studies involving big data sources or data science techniques like natural language processing machine learning, algorithmic fairness, topic modeling, or network analysis.
On 18 July 2023, Rebeka Kiss attended the Second Annual Opposition Studies Conference in London, hosted by the Centre for Opposition Studies with the Centre for British Politics and Government, King’s College London. The event centred around topics relating to the study of political opposition from disciplines including political studies, political science, and history, focusing on the UK and Europe. Rebeka Kiss’s presentation was entitled “Do MPs justify the draft laws submitted to the parliament? – An empirical analysis of evidence-based decision-making and the quality of explanatory notes.”
The Centre for Social Sciences has recently won 2 grants, in which our senior researcher Orsonya Ring is going to participate. Congratulations! The grants are the following: Moral emotions in politics – how they unite, how they divide (MORES) – Zsolt Boda Grievance Politics and Democracy (PLEDGE) – Gabriella Szabó
On July 4th and 5th, Miklós Sebők (along with work package co-leader Sven-Oliver Proksch and Christian Rauh) presented the final results of Work Package 5 (“Parliamentary, government and legal texts”) of the OPTED project. A preview of the upcoming release of the ParlLAwSpeech dataset was also provided at the event held at the University of Vienna. OPTED’s website is available here: https://opted.eu/