iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Georg Ahnert @ahnert.eurosky.social · 31/07/2026

This morning at #ic2s2 I have the chance to present ongoing work on applying a SEM from survey methods to LLM text annotations: 👉 Evaluating LLM Text Annotations Without Ground Truth 📍10:45, Mansfield (210), Understanding LLMs w/ @maximiliankreutner.bsky.social Alex Cernat & @mstrohm.bsky.social

Scatterplot that shows high correlation (r=0.97) and high NDCG@10 between estimated and true annotator quality for data from the Manifestos project

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Georg Ahnert @ahnert.eurosky.social · 22/07/2026

Excited to present a tutorial on simulating survey responses with LLMs at @ic2s2.bsky.social next week! ✨ 👉 central themes: analytic flexibility & hybrid samples with @gligoric.bsky.social, @indiiigo.bsky.social, @maximiliankreutner.bsky.social, @jrupprec.bsky.social, and @mstrohm.bsky.social – 🧵

Cover image for our IC2S2 Tutorial titled "An Introduction to Simulation Human Survey Responses with LLMs: Potentials and Pitfalls", happening on Tuesday, July 28 between 1:15pm and 4:30pm. The image features a few of the choices researchers can take when simulating survey responses with LLMs: questionnaire presentation and prompt perturbations, amongst others.

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Barbara Plank @barbaraplank.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

We have bigger models. Bigger conferences. Have our questions become bigger, too? That was the question I posed in my Presidential Address at #ACL2026 in San Diego. (1/6)

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MaiNLP lab, LMU Munich @mainlp.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

MaiNLP will be at #ACL2026 with a number of talks & posters, plus the ACL presidential address! See you in San Diego 🌊

Overview of MaiNLP papers/talks at ACL 2026

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Georg Ahnert @ahnert.eurosky.social · 01/07/2026

Super excited to present our work at #ACL2026 ✨ 👉 LLM-based social simulations have lots of analytic flexibility—response generation methods are often overlooked 📍Tue July 7, 9am, Poster Session F

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Georg Ahnert @ahnert.eurosky.social · 30/04/2026

Thrilled to share that our paper with @carohaensch.bsky.social, @barbaraplank.bsky.social & @mstrohm.bsky.social has been accepted to #ACL2026 Main! How to generate closed-ended survey responses 📊 with LLMs trained to produce open-ended text? 📝 We show results from 32 mio. simulated responses… 🧵

A scientific paper titled "Survey Response Generation: Generating Closed-Ended Survey Responses In-Silico with Large Language Models", written by Georg Ahnert, Anna-Carolina Haensch, Barbara Plank, and Markus Strohmaier. Additionally, a central figure of the paper with specification curves is shown.

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Clint Claessen @clint0475.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

📢 We are very happy to have Jana Jung for our third session of the TADA Spring Speaker Series. Jana will present recently published work on whether psychometric tests work for LLMs. When? 15th of April, 5pm (Berlin time) Where? Online (Sign up for the newsletter at tada.cool) See you there!

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Jana Jung @janajung.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

Are you using survey-style questionnaires designed for humans to measure characteristics of LLMs? In our #EACL2026 paper, we evaluate both the reliability and validity of such tests and found that their scores do not reflect real-world model behavior. In fact, they can be deceptive! 🧵1/3

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Francesco Pierri @frapierri.bsky.social · 27/11/2025

Happy to announce the 2nd edition of our Summer School in Computational Social Science that will take place in the beautiful Villa del Grumello on Lake Como between June 22-26, 2026! *** DEADLINE FOR APPLICATION: February 15, 2026 (firm deadline) *** More details here: css2.lakecomoschool.org

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Marlene Lutz @marlutz.bsky.social · 04/11/2025

👋🏼 I'm at #EMNLP2025 presenting "The Prompt Makes the Person(a): A Systematic Evaluation of Sociodemographic Persona Prompting for LLMs" 🕑 Thu. Nov 6, 12:30 - 13:30 📍 Findings Session 2, Hall C3

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Marlene Lutz @marlutz.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

🚨New paper alert🚨 🤔 Ever wondered how the way you write a persona prompt affects how well an LLM simulates people? In our #EMNLP2025 paper, we find that using interview-style persona prompts makes LLM social simulations less biased and more aligned with human opinions. 🧵1/7

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Georg Ahnert @ahnert.eurosky.social · 21/10/2025

Thrilled to talk about how seemingly small decisions in silicon sampling can have a large impact on simulated survey responses 👀 Join us on Oct 29th! 👈

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Indira Sen @indiiigo.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

Come join next Wednesday if you want to rant about society's love-hate relationship with LLMs!

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Indira Sen @indiiigo.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

👋 #ACL2025NLP 🇦🇹 @marlutz.bsky.social and I are presenting our poster on demographic representativeness of LLMs today! 🕦 10:30-12:00 📍 Hall X5 (board 1 or 14 according to different sources 🧐) Here’s the paper on ACL anthology: aclanthology.org/2025.finding... Drop by!

aclanthology.org

Missing the Margins: A Systematic Literature Review on the Demographic Representativeness of LLMs

Indira Sen, Marlene Lutz, Elisa Rogers, David Garcia, Markus Strohmaier. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025. 2025.

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Markus Strohmaier @mstrohm.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

Chair for Data Science in the Economic and Social Sciences at University of Mannheim having lots of fun at #ic2s2 @janajung.bsky.social @wanlo.bsky.social @indiiigo.bsky.social @jrupprec.bsky.social @maximiliankreutner.bsky.social and Stefano Balietti

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Georg Ahnert @ahnert.eurosky.social · 23/07/2025

Really inspiring keynote by @lauraknelson.bsky.social this morning at #IC2S2 discussing when to model and when to generate societies—among many other themes in computational qualitative research!

Laura Nelson on stage presenting her keynote at IC2S2. The slide lays out "A maturing field" of Computational Qualitative Research

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Indira Sen @indiiigo.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

Before heading to ACL, I'm excited to be at #IC2S2 this week! 🌞 I'll present a related working paper on validating LLM social simulations at the ABM session on Tuesday (11 AM, Vingen 7): indiiigo.github.io/files/GABM_V... (w/ @wanlo.bsky.social @mstrohm.bsky.social and @janalasser.bsky.social)

indiiigo.github.io

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Indira Sen @indiiigo.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

Do LLMs represent the people they're supposed simulate or provide personalized assistance to? We review the current literature in our #ACL2025 Findings paper and investigating what researchers conclude about the demographic representativeness of LLMs: osf.io/preprints/so... 1/

Screenshot of our paper "Missing the Margins: A Systematic Literature Review on the Demographic Representativeness of LLMs"

Details about what we annotated in our systematic review

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Maximilian Kreutner @maximiliankreutner.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

LLMs can understand political discourse, but can they actually predict votes of real politicians? Excited to share my work at #IC2S2 this week! I will present my poster on Tuesday between 1:30 and 3:30 p.m.

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Georg Ahnert @ahnert.eurosky.social · 18/07/2025

Really excited to also present this work at #IC2S2 next week in Norrköping! 🎉 I'd love to discuss how to produce LLM survey responses at my poster on Wed at 13:30 (Poster Session 2, Poster ID 68) 📊

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Jens Rupprecht @jrupprec.bsky.social · 18/07/2025

LLMs can generate synthetic survey responses, e.g. for imputation, but how reliable are they? 📋 At #IC2S2, I'll be sharing our research on the robustness of AI-generated responses to perturbations and if they mirror human survey biases. 🤖 Come by my poster on Tuesday between 1:30 and 3:30 p.m.

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Jana Jung @janajung.bsky.social · 17/07/2025

Very excited to head to #IC2S2 next week! 🎉 In our project, we tested whether a psychological assessment can measure sexism in LLMs, and found that applying such tools to LLMs is not as straightforward as it seems. Find me and my poster at Poster Session 1 (Tue 12:30-14:30) — hope to see you there

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Georg Ahnert @ahnert.eurosky.social · 14/07/2025

LLMs are trained to produce open-ended responses 📝, but most survey items require closed-ended responses instead 📊 This Wed 11:00–12:30 at #ESRA25, I'll discuss the large impact that Answer Production Methods have on prediction results + share recommendations for methods and parameters. 👈

A research setup for the evaluation of Answer Production Methods for closed-ended survey responses from LLMs. An LLM is prompted with a survey and an optional instruction, before a Answer Production Method is applied. These methods range from token-probabilities to open-ended text generation + classification. I then evaluated them against human survey answers and calculate individual-level accuracy as well as distribution alignment for sub-populations.

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icwsm.bsky.social @icwsm.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

Day 3 morning sessions: language change and generative AI #ICWSM

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Georg Ahnert @ahnert.eurosky.social · 16/06/2025

Excited to present our paper with @maxpe.bsky.social, @dgarcia.eu, and @mstrohm.bsky.social next week at #ICWSM! ✨ We extend social simulation with LLMs to a longitudinal setting by fine-tuning Temporal Adapters—here's how: 🧵

A lineplot that shows how scared people in the UK were over time, during the first COVID-19 lockdown. Our method (Llama 3 Temporal Adapters) produces similar estimates of as the survey data gathered by YouGov.

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DataFest Germany @datafestgermany.bsky.social · 31/01/2025

We're excited to announce #DataFest Germany 2025 at LMU Munich, March 28-30! In this #hackathon, students from diverse study programs compete for the best insights and visualizations from an exclusive dataset within 48 hours. More info: www.datafest.de/home

datafest.de

DataFest 🇩🇪 2025

Call for applications 2025! 📢 We are glad to announce our call for applications to join the 8th edition of DataFest Germany, which will take place at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich (Marc...

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Emilio Ferrara @emilioferrara.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

Ready for another Computational Social Science Starter Pack? Here is number 2! More amazing folks to follow! Many students and the next gen represented! go.bsky.app/GoEyD7d

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Emilio Ferrara @emilioferrara.bsky.social · 13/11/2024

Sharing my first Computational Social Science starter pack! Will grow with time, feel free to nominate and self nominate! go.bsky.app/CYmRvcK

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Chris Bail @chrisbail.bsky.social · 08/10/2023

Repost if you’ve participated in a Summer Institute in Computational Social Science. Let’s get #SICSS Bluesky going!

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