Andy Halterman
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ahalterman.bsky.social
Andy Halterman
@ahalterman.bsky.social
490 followers 60 following 6 posts
Assistant professor of political science at MSU. NLP, text, and conflict.
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Reposted by Andy Halterman
aidanmilliff.com
Very short summary of this paper:
Dr Strangelove "it could easily be accomplished with a computer" meme rewritten to say "it could be accomplished with a computer if you are careful."
September 19, 2025 at 7:25 PM
ahalterman.bsky.social
Very excited that my paper with @katakeith.bsky.social is now out in @polanalysis.bsky.social. We investigate whether LLMs actually follow the instructions/definitions provided in codebooks, propose some diagnostics, and release a new evaluation dataset.
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
Codebook LLMs: Evaluating LLMs as Measurement Tools for Political Science Concepts | Political Analysis | Cambridge Core
Codebook LLMs: Evaluating LLMs as Measurement Tools for Political Science Concepts
www.cambridge.org
September 19, 2025 at 1:45 PM
Reposted by Andy Halterman
polanalysis.bsky.social
Currently in FirstView: “Synthetically generated text for supervised text analysis.” @ahalterman.bsky.social proposes using LLMs to generate synthetic training data for training smaller, traditional supervised text models.
April 28, 2025 at 9:04 PM
ahalterman.bsky.social
New paper in Political Analysis on synthetic text data for training classifiers. Main idea: generate training examples with LLMs, then fit classifiers on synthetic (+real) text. Paper has validations and guidance.
Blog: andrewhalterman.com/post/synthet...
Paper: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
Synthetically generated text for supervised text analysis | Political Analysis | Cambridge Core
Synthetically generated text for supervised text analysis
www.cambridge.org
January 31, 2025 at 5:07 PM
ahalterman.bsky.social
A McSweeney's style parody. TREADSTONE RECRUITMENT OR YOUR PHD PROGRAM? Can you tell whether each quote is discussing a top-secret CIA black ops program or your department's graduate program? 1. “We'd hoped it might build into a good training platform, but quite honestly, for a strictly theoretical exercise, we thought it was far too expensive." 2. “You came to us. You volunteered. You said you'd do anything it takes." 3. "You haven't slept for a long time, have you? Have you made a decision? This can't go on, you know. You have to decide." 4. "The details? No. I mean, I was told it was voluntary. I don't know if that's true or not, but that's what I was told." 5. "Stop running from the truth. You chose to come here! You chose to stay! And no matter how much you want to forget it... eventually you're going to have to face how you chose to become [who you are]." 6. "You could have left at any time. And you knew exactly what it meant for you if you chose to stay." 7. "You're not a liar are you? Or too weak to see this through?" 8. “Look, they took vulnerable subjects, okay? You mix that with the right pharmacology and some serious behavior modification..." 9. “You made yourself into who you are."
December 3, 2024 at 6:04 PM
ahalterman.bsky.social
I couldn't find a tutorial I liked to get students who know R up and running with Python, so I wrote my own! Part 1 is here: andrewhalterman.com/post/python_...
(And if you have a tutorial you like, please let me know!)
November 8, 2023 at 7:09 PM
ahalterman.bsky.social
The optimal amount of dad joke cringe when teaching undergrads is > 0.
The "focus group" meme from I Think You Should Leave. The original text, "A great steering wheel that doesn't whiff out the window while I driving" is replaced with "A great steering wheel that whiffs out the window while I driving (Schelling 1966)"
October 17, 2023 at 12:46 PM