OPaL Joint Workshops 2025: Language, Policy, and Technology

08 December 2025 09:00 — 10 December 2025 Hotel Zinkensdamm, Stockholm, Sweden

In an era where artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming how knowledge is produced, communicated, and contested, the Open Parliament Laboratory (OPaL) invites scholars from across disciplines to explore the evolving intersections of language, policy, and technology.

Our 2025 conference – Knowledge, Policy, and Language in the Age of AI – gathers experts in education, political science, linguistics, digital humanities, AI, and computational social science to address pressing questions related to the use of AI and computational text analysis in social science and humanities research. The Open Parliament Laboratory (OPaL) is a research environment focused on AI-assisted research on open parliamentary data. It will organize four joint workshops on the theme “Knowledge, Policy, and Language in the Age of AI”. These interdisciplinary workshops will bring together experts in AI-assisted text analysis, specifically language modelling through the use of Large Language Models (LLMs), policy analysis, education research, and parliamentary studies. This diverse expertise provides participants with an opportunity to discuss  their research with colleagues from a broad range of scientific backgrounds.

The OPaL Joint Workshops are organized in connection with the ongoing research project “Decoding the Marketization of Education in Sweden.” This project is devoted to leveraging extensive parliamentary data and novel methods of text analysis to deepen our understanding of the radical shift in Swedish education policy. During the 1980s and 1990s, the Swedish education system transformed from one of the most centralized and uniform education systems to one of the most decentralized and marketized education systems in the world. While this paradigmatic policy shift has received significant scholarly attention, the causes, mechanisms, and processes of the transformation are still not well understood.

Deadline: 15th of September 2025
Notification of acceptance: 30th of September 2025
Conference: 8th to 10th of December 2025
Location: Hotel Zinkensdamm, Stockholm, Sweden

Costs for travel, housing and conference fees will be covered by OPaL for authors of accepted contributions.

We welcome submissions to the following four workshops:

1. Knowing through Code – Language Models in Humanities and Social Sciences
2. Education Policy History in the Nordic Countries
3. The Use of LLMs and Computer-Assisted Text Analysis in Policy and Parliamentary Studies
4. Small Languages and Large Language Models – Overcoming Challenges with Low-Resource Languages

Contact: Martin Karlsson martin.karlsson@oru.se

This workshop invites contributions that reflect on the epistemological implications of using large language models and other computational tools for analyzing linguistic and textual data. We are particularly interested in how such technologies challenge or reconfigure traditional modes of knowledge production in the humanities and social sciences. How do we critically compare the opacity of language models with the less formalized, yet equally opaque, interpretive processes of human researchers? What new forms of authority, evidence, and validity emerge when research is shaped or mediated by computational systems?

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

●      Human and machine interpretation in qualitative research

●      Epistemic opacity and transparency in computational analysis

●      Critical uses of LLMs in textual or discourse analysis

●      Authority and authorship in machine-mediated scholarship

●      Validation and credibility in LLM-assisted research processes

We welcome papers that explore the historical development of education policies across the Nordic countries. How have Nordic education systems responded to shifting social, political, and economic conditions? What ideals and tensions have shaped policy debates over time — and how do these legacies continue to inform contemporary reforms? We invite contributions that examine key moments, actors, institutions, and discourses in the making of education policy, the role of welfare state ideologies, and the evolving relationship between education, equity, and citizenship.

We invite contributions that investigate the historical trajectories of education policies in the Nordic context. Submissions may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

●      Key moments and turning points in Nordic education policy history

●      Influential actors, institutions, and policy networks

●      The role of welfare state ideologies in shaping educational agendas

●      Responses to political, economic, and demographic change

●      Discourses of inclusion, differentiation, and meritocracy over time

●      Comparative historical perspectives within or beyond the Nordic region

Improvements in data availability and analytical techniques have created new opportunities within legislative studies and policy analysis. In recent years, studies have increasingly employed computational techniques to analyse large parliamentary text corpora. We invite empirical papers as well as contributions focusing on methodological innovation and critical reflections on the use of computational text analysis of parliamentary data, e.g. utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) and other computational methods for analyzing policy documents, legislative debates, and political communication. The workshop provides a platform to discuss novel methodologies, share findings, and explore the theoretical implications of text-based approaches to studies of legislatures and policy development.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

●      Legislative speechmaking and parliamentary discourse

●      Political parties and ideological positioning

●      Policy analysis and legislative processes

●      Evaluating the validity of LLM-Based Parliamentary Analysis

●      Developing Domain-Specific LLMs for Parliamentary Texts Data

 

In this workshop, we will explore the intersection of Large Language Models (LLMs) and low-resource languages, with a particular focus on Nordic and Baltic languages. While LLMs have achieved remarkable success in ­widely spoken languages, the same level of performance is often challenging to achieve for languages with limited datasets and linguistic resources. This workshop will highlight the challenges and opportunities in adapting LLMs to support smaller languages and foster linguistic diversity. This workshop aims to combine theoretical insights with practical examples to showcase how cutting-edge techniques can be applied to overcome these challenges.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

●      Training and fine-tuning LLMs for low-resource languages

●      Data collection, augmentation, and synthetic data for underrepresented languages

●      Transfer learning and multilingual pretraining strategies

●      Evaluation benchmarks and metrics for small and low-resource languages

●      Cross-lingual and zero-shot learning for low-resource languages

●      Linguistic challenges in modeling syntax and semantics in smaller languages

●      Bias, fairness, and representational equity in LLMs across languages

Registration: OPaL Joint Workshops 2025

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