Ewan Thomas-Colquhoun and Yorick Scheffler presented a new method for automatically identifying political stances
Researcher and PhD student Ewan Thomas-Colquhoun and HPI master’s student Yorick Scheffler attended the GOR 2026 Conference in Cologne, where they introduced a new AI- and large-language-model-based approach to detecting political positions. The method is implemented in the APSI platform.
The tool uses a transparent, reproducible artificial intelligence approach to estimate scores across three political dimensions: economic ideology, support for liberal democratic values, and populist rhetoric.
“I would say that seeing the interest in using the tool, especially because of its transparency and explainability features, makes it stand out. Much of the research discussed uses proprietary LLMs, which have limitations for research in terms of reproducibility”, Scheffler reflected after the conference.
Yorick Scheffler and Ewan Thomas-Colquhoun
APSI relies on a pre-trained language model that was fine-tuned on 200,000 political text pairs to specialize in the political domain. The validation process included expert assessments from 147 political science scholars published in leading political science journals. APSI demonstrates strong agreement with expert evaluations across the three dimensions.
The GOR Conference is organized annually by the German Society for Online Research (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Online-Forschung, DGOF). Founded in 1998, the association aims to bridge various research fields, including sociology, psychology, political science, economics, market and opinion research, and data science, through online research methods and to facilitate knowledge transfer between academia and industry, according to the official website.
“It was great seeing the cutting edge in online research, the strategies that are developing to gather and analyse data and the experimentation with how to implement AI effectively. I most appreciated meeting and sharing ideas with other researchers about how we can work towards developing new best practices in a constantly developing environment,” noted Thomas-Colquhoun.