How to use APSI — a new tool for identifying political positions in text

A webinar marking the launch of APSI will take place online on Wednesday, 8 April 2026, from 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. (CEST). APSI helps automatically detect political rhetoric and ideological stance in text.  

APSI was developed by researchers at the Hasso-Plattner Institute/Universität Potsdam in Germany, Dr. Juan S. Gómez Cruces, Yorick Scheffler, and Ewan Thomas-Colquhoun. The tool uses pre-trained language models to estimate where texts fall along three key political dimensions:  

• Economic ideology  

• Support for liberal democratic values (currently under construction)

• Populist versus pluralist rhetoric  

In this webinar the researchers will demonstrate: 

• How does APSI work and how to use it effectively. 

• What is novel about the underlying methodological approach. 

• How can APSI be applied in academic research, policy analysis, and civil society work.  

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 underlying base model was originally trained on 2.73 million multilingual text pairs to learn general semantic inference, providing a strong foundation for domain-specific adaptation. 

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 our dimensions. 

Register by filling out the form. If you have questions, concerns, or access needs, please contact pathtopower@hpi.de in advance of the event.