August 2024

The purpose of the EXCELLENCE research call, National Research Excellence Programme is to provide an opportunity to develop successful participation in the funding programmes launched by the European Research Council (ERC) for researchers who have demonstrated their standing in the international elite of the scientific community with significant international achievements in competing for funding in the past.

Two proposals received funding in the first round, including Miklós Sebők's (HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences, Institute for Political Science) BABELGLOB: A State-of-the-Art AI Tool for the Global Analysis of Policy Frames. 

The BABELGLOB project aims to develop an open-source (freely available), artificial intelligence-based text classification tool that can revolutionise the global analysis of public policy frameworks. The research has 4 main objectives. First, to create a state-of-the-art AI platform that can automatically classify and analyse public policy texts in more than 100 languages. This will enable the replacement of human coding, making research processes significantly faster and more cost-effective. Secondly, the platform aims to ensure its continued compatibility with the latest language models, always using the most advanced natural language processing (NLP) technologies. Thirdly, it aims to develop an open, scalable and reproducible system that is freely available for use by the international social science community. Finally, the aim is to establish Hungary as a leader in open-source NLP services for social sciences. The expected outcomes of the research include an AI platform available at babel.poltextlab.com, an extensive multilingual text corpus of public policy documents (2012–2024), new methodological approaches for multilingual text classification, scientific publications in leading journals and the organisation of international workshops and conferences on the topic.