Synthetic data
Can LLMs generate respondent panels that pass standard quality checks? When they do not, where do they fail, and can we measure it before we use them?
Nuffield College Est. 2023
Oxford LLMs · Research · Teaching · Community
Large Language Models for Social Science.
We run an annual summer school at Nuffield College, develop an open-source course on the fundamentals of LLMs for social scientists, and work on methods research. Our faculty spans academic research and the ML industry. Everything is open.
Research
Methods for LLMs in social science.
We develop methods for applying language models to social science research. Code and datasets are open source on GitHub and Hugging Face.
Opinion prediction
How well do open-weights models recover real survey responses across languages, age cohorts, and political contexts, and what drives the gaps?
Evaluation
Building eval sets that survive contamination, treating annotator disagreement as a measurement signal rather than noise.
Annual intensive
Five days at Nuffield.
Early-career researchers. Lectures, labs, collaborative research. Now entering its fourth year.
2025 Cohort
30 researchers. 5 days. Nuffield College.
Lectures on LLM fundamentals, evaluation, fine-tuning, and AI safety. A Kaggle-style competition ran alongside a collaborative research project.
Past schools
Three years of cohorts.
Open courseware
Language models for social science.
A five-module course mirroring the summer-school syllabus. Taught by invitation at Oxford, ESSCA Paris, and the EUI. All materials on GitHub.
Module 1 Foundations Module 2 From Models to Tools Module 3 Deploying for Research Module 4 Extraction & RAG Module 5 Agentic Workflows
Oxford · DPIR
ESSCA · Paris
EUI · Florence
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