V-Shift

10 February 2025 – poltextLAB presentation at Sciences Po for Love Data Week 2025

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.

9 February 2025 – GUEST LECTURE BY GENNADII IAKOVLEV at poltextLAB

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.

28 JANUARY 2025 – MIKLÓS SEBŐK PRESENTS AT THE INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF THE POLISH ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

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.

21-22 NOVEMBER 2024 – 2ND BUDAPEST METHODS WORKSHOP ON LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS AND GENERATIVE AI: SOCIAL SCIENCE APPLICATIONS AND LEGAL ASPECTS

The 2nd Budapest Methods Workshop on Large Language Models and Generative AI: Social Science Applications and Legal Aspects took place on November 21-22, 2024 at the HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences in Budapest. The aim of the workshop was to present the latest research findings and to foster scientific dialogue on the use of artificial intelligence in the social sciences and to promote the development of innovative solutions. The pictures from the workshop are available here.

5 November, 2024 – Miklós Sebők presents at the Festival of Hungarian Science

On 5 November 2024, Miklós Sebők participated as an invited speaker at the Festival of Hungarian Science organised by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA). The event was titled Science and Parliament: the Social Impact of Artificial Intelligence. Among other researchers from HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences, Miklós Sebők commented the paper “AI Strategy ’24’08 – Opportunities and Threats” by Professor György Cserey, Dean of the Faculty of Information Technology and Bionics at Pázmány Péter Catholic University. In addition, Miklós Sebők presented the ongoing AI solutions at poltextLAB.The event can be viewed on the YouTube video below (in Hungarian): https://youtu.be/DxjcIJhgRec.

18 October, 2024 – Call for Papers: Large language models and Generative AI workshop

Call for Papers for the 2nd Budapest Methods Workshop on Large Language Models and Generative AI: Social Science Applications and Legal Aspects Workshop Dates: November 21-22, 2024Venue: Centre for Social Sciences, 4 Tóth Kálmán utca, Budapest, H-1097Organizers: poltextLAB (HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences, Budapest)Organizing Committee: Rebeka Kiss, Kitti Mezei, Orsolya Ring, Miklós Sebők, István Üveges On behalf of the poltextLAB research laboratory at the HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences, we cordially invite you to submit proposals for a two-day interdisciplinary workshop titled “Large Language Models and Generative AI: Social Science Applications and Legal Aspects.” This workshop will focus on applying open large language models (LLMs), such as BERT, and open generative AI solutions, such as Llama, to social research. While our primary interest lies in discussing results from open models, we also welcome submissions that evaluate the performance of open LLMs compared to proprietary models, such as GPT-4, across various research tasks. Building on the success of our previous event that examined data-driven approaches to policy frame analysis and the role of LLMs in comparative research, this workshop aims to explore how LLMs and generative AI can be leveraged to analyze and interpret social research data (with a focus on qualitative data sources). Furthermore, we will address the legal and ethical implications of deploying LLMs and generative AI in social science research. We are particularly interested in papers addressing the following issues: Optimal Utilization of Existing LLMs: Papers showcasing the effective use of current open LLMs in research, particularly in classification tasks. Discussions on the benefits, challenges, and limitations of these models in social science research are highly encouraged. Advancements in LLMs for Social Science: Submissions highlighting new technical developments in LLMs relevant to social science research, including innovative methods for synthetic data generation, model pre-training, fine-tuning, or evaluation. Comparing Open vs. Proprietary Models: Papers that compare the performance of open fine-tuned LLMs and proprietary models (such as GPT-4) in research, with particular emphasis on issues related to validation, replicability, and transparency. Original Language, Translated, and Multilingual Applications: Research exploring using LLMs for social science tasks across different languages—whether through original, translated, or multilingual data. LLMs and Policy Frame Analysis: Investigations into how LLMs can analyze and interpret policy frames, identifying and assessing policy narratives, biases, and frames within media, institutional (legislative and executive), and other political communications. Legal and Ethical Considerations of Applying Open Large Language Models and Generative AI: We invite non-technical papers on the legal and ethical dimensions of applying open LLMs and generative AI for policy analysis. Topics may include concerns regarding data privacy, algorithmic bias, transparency, accountability, and responsible AI usage in social research. Submission details: We welcome proposals for presentations and data/model presentations related to the above topics. Submissions should include: Title and Abstract: A brief description of the proposed presentation, including its relevance to the workshop themes (max 300 words). Presenter Information: Name, affiliation, and contact details of the main presenter and any co-authors. Submission deadline: October 31st, 2024 How to Apply: Please submit your proposal using the following submission form. If you have any questions or need additional information, contact us at workshop@poltextlab.com. Presentation details: Presentation Format: Each accepted proposal will be allocated a 12-minute presentation slot, followed by a Q&A session. Audience: The workshop targets all career levels. Travel funds: We have limited travel funds available, especially for early career researchers, legal and ethics experts in the field of LLMs, and scholars working with Central or Eastern European data.  Call for Papers PDF Sponsors

17 October 2024 – The Narratives of the War in Ukraine in Czech News Media

On October 17, 2024, Jakub Stauber, guest speaker of the VSHIFT Momentum project at poltextLAB, gave a lecture at the HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences Institute for Political Science titled The Narratives of the War in Ukraine in Czech News Media. Jakub Stauber is assistant professor at the Institute of Political Science of Charles University in Prague. The guest lecture focused on the application of supervised machine-learning methods to detect the presence of Russian and Western narratives about the war in Ukraine. Based on a unique corpus of Czech main news media outlets, the presented analysis  demonstrated the capabilities and possible limitations of the newly fine-tuned deBERTa model.

15 October, 2024 – GenAI course at HUN-REN by Miklós Sebők and Rebeka Kiss

On 15 October 2024, Miklós Sebők and Rebeka Kiss held a course on the use of generative AI in research to 50+ researchers at HUN-REN. The course focused on the increasing significance of generative AI tools in academic research.The full-day training was structured in three key parts. The first section introduced participants to the conceptual foundations of generative AI. The second section explored practical applications in research, such as prompt engineering, selecting appropriate AI models for different research tasks, and assessing the cost of different AI tools. In the third section, the course covered essential ethical and legal considerations, such as data management, how to properly cite the use of these tools, and how to comply with the requirements of academic journals.Participants were encouraged to submit their own research questions and data in advance, for which they received tailored solutions using generative AI during the course. The course syllabus is available here: https://poltextlab.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/GenAI_tematika.pdf. The event was supported by the European Union within the framework of the RRF-2.3.1-21-2022-00004 Artificial Intelligence National Laboratory Program and the HUN-REN Hungarian Research Network.

15 October, 2024 – poltextLAB Co-Hosted Beyond Compliance 2024 Forum on Digital Ethics in Research

On 14-15 October 2024, poltextLAB, in collaboration with ERCIM (European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics) co-hosted the Beyond Compliance 2024 Forum on Digital Ethics in Research. The event, held in Budapest gathered leading experts to discuss the ethical challenges that researchers face in the digital era, with a strong focus on research integrity beyond regulatory frameworks. This year’s program featured a diverse lineup of keynotes, interactive sessions, and panel discussions addressing a wide range of pressing topics. More details about the programme are available at: https://www.ercim.eu/beyond-compliance.

15 October, 2024 – Miklós Sebők among NRDI Science Patronage programme winners

Miklós Sebők has been among the award winners of the National Research, Development and Innovation Office’s Science Patronage Programme. The main objective of the Science Patronage call, funded by the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund, is to promote the internationalisation of the Hungarian scientific research community and to support the development of open science in Hungary. Sebők has received 6 223 000 HUF to organize an international conference in Hungary. Read more about the Science Patronage call (in Hungarian): https://nkfih.gov.hu/palyazoknak/nkfi-alap/tamogatott-projektek-mec24.