news

All news announcements.

Jul 28, 2026 I am co-organizing a tutorial at the 12th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC²S²) in Burlington, Vermont. Tutorial: An Introduction to Simulating Human Survey Responses with Large Language Models: Potentials and Pitfalls This hands-on session introduces researchers to employing large language models for generating survey data with an emphasis on methodological discipline. We address how “silicon samples” can supplement human data collection through pretesting and statistical correction. Topics covered include:
  • Systematic exploration of how design decisions affect simulation results
  • The QSTN framework for structured simulations
  • Python-based practical exercises for generating simulated responses
  • Use cases including missing-data imputation and statistical correction
  • Critical assessment of limitations, validation issues, and ethical considerations
The tutorial is co-organized together with Georg Ahnert, Maximilian Kreutner, Indira Sen, Markus Strohmaier (University of Mannheim) and Kristina Gligorić (Johns Hopkins University).
Jul 03, 2026 I will present our paper Prompt Perturbations Reveal Human-Like Biases in Large Language Model Survey Responses at the Seventh Workshop on NLP and Computational Social Science (NLP+CSS) at ACL 2026 in San Diego. We test 18 large language models on survey questions from the World Values Survey, applying ten different perturbations to question wording and answer options across over 334,800 simulated survey interviews. We find that 17 out of 18 models display recency bias, disproportionately favoring the last-presented answer option, while larger models show greater overall robustness. Our results highlight the need for careful prompt design when generating synthetic survey data with LLMs.
Jun 15, 2026 I attended the CSS School at Lake Como and presented our work on how the level of human response variation in a survey items affects the alignment of synthetic survey responses with persona prompting.
May 20, 2026 I attended the CSS DACH Conference in Vienna, Austria, bringing together researchers in Computational Social Science from German-speaking countries.
May 11, 2026 I presented our paper at LREC 2026 in Palma de Mallorca, Spain: German General Social Survey Personas: A Survey-Derived Persona Prompt Collection for Population-Aligned LLM Studies
Feb 19, 2026 Our paper QSTN: A Modular Framework for Robust Questionnaire Inference with Large Language Models has been accepted at EACL 2026 System Demonstrations!
Feb 12, 2026 Our paper German General Social Survey Personas: A Survey-Derived Persona Prompt Collection for Population-Aligned LLM Studies has been accepted at LREC 2026 in Mallorca, Spain! We also release the accompanying GGSS Personas dataset via GESIS.
Oct 08, 2025 I participated in a workshop at GESIS in Cologne, Germany discussing the opportunities and challenges of simulating societies with Artificial Intelligence, especially Large Language Models. I also presented our current work on representative persona collections: German General Social Survey Personas: A Survey-Derived Persona Prompt Collection for Population-Aligned LLM Studies
Jun 30, 2025 I will be participating at IC²S² Conference in Norrköping, Sweden from the 21. to the 24. July 2025 presenting a poster of the preprint: Prompt Perturbations Reveal Human-Like Biases in LLM Survey Responses