Miklós Sebők and Csaba Molnár gave a successful presentation at this year’s Comparative Agendas Project General Conference in Konstanz, Germany, where they received highly positive feedback. Additionally, Miklós Sebők showcased the latest features and models of the Babel Machine during a plenary session, highlighting its newest capabilities for classifying documents into specific public policy subtopics.
On May 30, 2025, Anna Takács gave a presentation titled “Crisis-Exploitation, Sticky Narratives or Fear-Mongering? A Research Agenda for the Comparative Study of Policy Crises and Illiberal Policy Frames” at the HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences, as part of the 30th Annual Conference of the Hungarian Political Science Association. Her talk was delivered in the panel “In the Shadow of Algorithms: Political Science in the Age of AI.” The presented paper examines the illiberal framing in parliamentary speeches on immigration and the COVID-19 pandemic in Austria, Germany, Hungary, and the United States.
On 13 May 2025, Miklós Sebők gave a lecture at the HUN-REN BTK Institute of Philosophy titled How Can Generative Artificial Intelligence Be Used in Social Science Research? A Methodological Overview with Examples from Political Philosophy. The talk was part of the “AI? Philosophical Questions about Artificial Intelligence” seminar series. Drawing on the Prompt Revolution methodological blog, Dr. Sebők introduced current generative AI tools used in social science and philosophical research. He covered the entire research cycle, from topic selection and literature review to qualitative data processing. Further details of the event can be found HERE.
On 2 April 2025, Orsolya Ring delivered a lecture at the Central European University (CEU) as part of the Borderless Knowledge: What Can AI Offer to Science? (“Határtalan tudás: Mit adhat az AI a tudománynak?”) event. In her presentation, she explored how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming academic research, with a particular focus on its role in big data-driven studies — especially in processing the textual data widely used in the Social Sciences. Drawing on illustrative examples, she demonstrated how large language models can support the automated analysis of news media and help identify underlying patterns within it. She underscored that AI not only enhances the efficiency of scholarly work but also introduces new perspectives to empirical research. Further details of the event can be found here.
Miklós Sebők gave a presentation on Artificial Intelligence in University Education and Scientific Research. He focused on the applications of generative AI in education and research, particularly in plagiarism detection, classification tasks, and the modernization of student reporting and assessment.
The Methods Workshop on Large Language Models and Generative AI: Advancing Policy Frame and Media Narrative Analysis took place on February 14, 2025, in Prague, organized by poltextLAB, with the support of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA) and the International Visegrad Fund. The aim of the workshop was to present the latest research findings and foster scientific dialogue on the application of artificial intelligence in the social sciences. The program featured presentations on topics such as political information flows, sentiment analysis of parliamentary speeches, and the use of generative AI in policy frame analysis. The pictures from the workshop are available here.
On 13 February 2025, Rebeka Kiss delivered a presentation at the “Legal Remedies for Flawed Legislative Procedures” workshop, organised under the auspices of the Institute of Legal Studies of the HUN-REN CSS and the Union of Attorneys for Democracy and the Rule of Law. Her presentation focused on poltextLAB’s research on legislative quality, with particular emphasis on legislative backsliding, the prevalence of legislative basket cases, and the implications of tailor-made laws. The workshop focused on identifying irregularities in parliamentary lawmaking and assessing the legal mechanisms available for their remedy, with particular attention to the role of the Constitutional Court and judicial review. The event also included expert-led roundtable discussions on constitutional challenges in the legislative process and the role of the legal profession and attorneys in the legislative process.The program is available here.
As part of International Love Data Week 2025, under the theme “Whose Data Is It, Anyway?”, Miklós Sebők and Barbara Babolcsay were featured speakers at a key event exploring artificial intelligence and metadata in the social sciences. The webinar, titled “Intelligence Artificielle et Métadonnées en SHS”, was held online on February 10, 2025. The session provided insights into the FAIRwithDDI and ONTOLISST projects, focusing on AI-driven metadata curation and the use of natural language processing (NLP) for automated subject classification.
We are excited to welcome Gennadii Iakovlev on the 25th of February as a guest lecturer for our V-Shift Lendület project, presenting his groundbreaking research titled: Affective Elite Polarization in European Parliamentary Speeches: A Novel Measurement Approach Using Large Language Models. The abstract of his research project is as follows. This project introduces a novel measure of affective elite polarization using Large Language Models. We present polarization data aggregated at the party-quarter level over the past two decades for three countries: Hungary, the UK, and Italy. To perform a sentiment analysis on these corpora of parliamentary speeches, we are utilizing pre-trained generative machine learning software. In so-doing, we pinpoint elite attitudes toward various in-groups and out-groups and combine these attitudes into an index of affective polarization. This approach paves the way for creating a time-series, EU-wide dataset of affective polarization spanning the last twenty years. Our findings reveal that affective elite polarization is consistent with, and falls somewhat between, affective mass and ideological elite polarization. The fine-grained party-quarter analysis shows that affective elite polarization slightly increases during elections and country- or party-level crises but more than that significantly decreases afterward. Also, the parties’ polarization is more responsive to party-level than to country-level events —- and so is their aggregated country-level score. Additionally, we find that governing parties tend to exhibit significantly lower levels of polarization compared to those in opposition. The lecture will take place at the HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences, on February 25th, 2025 at 1:00 PM.
On 28 January 2025, Miklós Sebők was an invited speaker at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, in the Computational Social Science Department where he participated in a seminar on Novel Measurement Problems in Social Sciences. Dr. Sebők presented ongoing AI-driven solutions at poltextLAB, focusing on his article, Leveraging Open Large Language Models for Multilingual Policy Topic Classification: The Babel Machine Approach. The abstract and the presentation are available here.