Applied Large Language Models

Zach Dickson

Postdoctoral Research Fellow
London School of Economics

Overview

Trulli

  • A Brief Introduction to Large Language Models (LLMs)
  • Political Science Applications
  • Examples and Hands-on Exercise
    • Classification
      • Classification with GPT-3.5
      • Validation and Verification
  • Challenges & Ethical Considerations

What are Large Language Models (LLMs)?

  • Formal definition:
    • A large language model (LLM) is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm that uses deep learning techniques and massively large data sets to understand, summarize, generate and predict new content based on the input it receives.
  • In simpler terms:
    • LLMs are AI models that can understand and generate human-like text
    • They are trained on large amounts of text data and can perform a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks
  • Examples: GPT-3, ChatGPT, BERT, BLOOM, Claude

Introduction to Large Language Models

Classification, Categorization & Regression


Trulli
Source: Lai et al. (2024) in Political Analysis

Political Science Applications

LLMs in Survey Experiments and Polling


Trulli

Some Applied Examples

  1. Using the GPT-3.5 API
  2. Classification Validation
  3. Building your own classifier
    1. validation and verification


Notebook

Trulli
Trulli