SoDa Seed Grant Series:

How Can Large Language Models Help Us Identify and Use Constructs that We Can Trust?
A Presentation with Commentary and Q&A webinar

Thursday, April 25, 2024

12:00 PM - 1:00 PM in Eastern Time

Abstract: The idea of a construct is central in the psychological and social sciences: constructs are abstract categories like empathy, misinformation, or benefits of social interaction that are operationalized in order to make them measurable. Social scientists spend an enormous amount of time and care in thinking about constructs; they are the vocabulary over which theories are defined. This stands in striking contrast to a great deal of current computational research in AI and NLP, where theory tends to be secondary and most work utilizes directly observable behaviors, simplistic operational definitions, or intuitive but poorly-defined proxy relationships. The gap between social science needs and computational practice is deeply problematic: computer scientists often blast forward with highly scalable methods without establishing careful connections to real-world problems and research questions, while social scientists often expend effort on traditional manual analysis out of a distrust for automated solutions or, conversely, they use the output of computational systems uncritically as if what they produce is known to be correct.  [READ MORE]

Presenters:
Philip Resnik, Ph.D. (PI)

MPower Professor, Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland.

Alexander Hoyle

PhD Candidate, Computational Linguistics and Information Processing Lab, University of Maryland

Commentator / Industry Expert:

Andrew Stavisky, Ph.D.

Assistant Director, US Government Accountability Office (GAO)