SCOPE Research and International Collaborations Presented at the COST OPINION Conference in Zagreb
On 24 August 2026, the SCOPE team and its international research collaborators presented three studies at the COST Action OPINION Conference “What are Opinions? Integrating Theory and Methods for Automatically Analyzing Opinionated Communication” in Zagreb. The contributions focused on the reliability, stability, and potential biases of large language models (LLMs) in communication and social science research:
Olga Zagovora presented a study on the temporal stability of large language models, conducted in collaboration with Ana Jovančević, Ljubiša Bojić, and Velibor Ilić as part of the collaboration between the SCOPE project and COST Action OPINION. The research examines the stability and reproducibility of LLM outputs across repeated evaluations, different models, and different communication-related tasks. First results from this line of research have been published in Scientific Reports: “Comparing Large Language Models and Human Annotators in Latent Content Analysis of Sentiment, Political Leaning, Emotional Intensity and Sarcasm.”
Ana Jovančević (University of Limerick, Ireland) presented “Simulating Citizens, Amplifying Stereotypes: A Multilingual Study of Persona Effects in Large Language Models,” joint work with Olga Zagovora, Ljubiša Bojić, and Velibor Ilić. The study investigates how persona prompting affects stereotypical evaluations generated by LLMs across different languages.
Aleksandra Urman (University of Zurich, Switzerland) presented “Gender Representation in Large Language Models: A Cross-Linguistic and Cross-Model Analysis,” joint work with Emese Domahidi, Jones Gruber, Ana Jovančević, Michaela Maier, Dren Gerguri, Jaromir Mazak, and Mariken van der Velden. The study examines gender representation across different LLMs and languages.