UPenn’s Department of Political Science and Princeton’s Department of Politics are co-hosting an APSA pre-conference at the University of Pennsylvania on Language Models in Social Science. The conference will take place on September 4, 2024. This is the Wednesday before the American Political Science Association meeting, which will take place in Philadelphia. The organizing leads for this meeting are Nick Pangakis and Arthur Spirling.

Overview

This pre-conference will bring together researchers interested in the study of (large) language models (LMs) and their application for the study of social science questions. Our four focus areas for the conference include, but are not limited to, papers that demonstrate…

• optimal use of existing LMs in research, including their potential promise and pitfalls
• new technical advances in LMs of interest to the social science community
• the effects of LMs on society, the economy or governance
• extensions of LMs and related technologies like DNNs or transformer-based models to new types of non-text data, such as audio or visual.

Anyone may submit a paper on any related theme, but we are particularly keen to ensure that presenters receive constructive, focussed, thoughtful and thorough feedback from (multiple) discussants. With that in mind, we encourage the submission of work that is not yet published, but that is far enough developed such that comments are likely to be helpful and actionable. Given the expected audience of applied researchers, papers with a substantive focus are likely to be the best fit but no type of paper is unwelcome at the submission stage.

Because the pre-conference takes place a day before the 2024 APSA conference, we will not provide funding for transport or lodging. For those who are accepted to participate, we will provide breakfast and lunch.

Application to Present, Discuss and Attend

The application process is now open; it will close on April 19, 2024.

To apply, go here

Conference Schedule

Will appear here