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 (Germany). The tool uses pre-trained language models to estimate where texts fall along three key political dimensions:  

• Economic ideology  

• Support for liberal democratic values  

• Populist versus pluralist rhetoric  

The model supports 26 languages and focuses on linguistic patterns, providing interpretable probabilistic scores.  

In this webinar, you will learn:  

• How APSI works and how to use it effectively  

• What is novel about the underlying methodological approach  

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

You can also ask questions to the researchers behind the tool: Dr. Juan S. Gómez Cruces, Yorick Scheffler, and Ewan Thomas-Colquhoun.  

Register by filling out the form.  

The model was first trained on 2.73 million multilingual text pairs to learn general semantic inference and subsequently 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 (r ≈ 0.81–0.84), with an average absolute deviation of approximately 9–12 points on a 0–100 scale.