The Methods Lab with contributors Zeerak Talat and Flor Miriam Plaza del Arco are excited to introduce the workshop “Social Science and Language Models – Methods and theory to responsible research on and with Language Technologies” taking place on April 3–4, 2025 at the Weizenbaum Institute. This hybrid event encourages interdisciplinary collaboration to promote ethically responsible research in the application of natural language technology. As methodology utilizing language models is increasingly applied to a variety of contexts from social science, health-care settings to computer software development, research suggests the growing need to monitor potential biased outcomes of its use. However, the absence of collaborative understanding between researchers of social science and those in Natural Language Processing (NLP), perpetuates discrimination as biases in the conception and measurement of socio-technical systems often go unrecognized.
Therefore we hope to engage a diverse group of researchers involved in the methodology of social or economic fields of discipline to address this prejudice in language technologies. Submissions of abstracts are encouraged to involve aspects of bias in the mitigation and measurement of NLP, as well as its implications in the social sciences.
For more information, visit our program page. We are looking forward to your participation!