The 11th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC²S²) took place in Norrköping from July 21 to 24, 2025. This annual event was hosted by the Swedish Excellence Center for Computational Social Science and the Institute for Analytical Sociology (IAS) in Norrköping.
IC²S² has established itself as the leading conference at the intersection of social and computational sciences, bringing together researchers from across the globe in fields such as sociology, economics, political science, psychology, cognitive science, management, computer science, statistics, and a broad spectrum of natural and applied sciences. The conference is dedicated to advancing the understanding of the social world through the use of large-scale data and computational methods.
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The Louis de Geer concert and conference center (pictures above)
Information at the entrance
The conference featured papers on a wide range of topics, including:
- Large language models for social research
- Network analysis of social systems
- Large-scale social experiments
- Text analysis and natural language processing (NLP) of social phenomena
- Analysis of meaning through computational analysis of text, images, audio, video, etc.
- Computational methods to map and study cultural patterns and dynamics
- Methods and issues of social data collection
- Methods and analyses of biased, selective, or incomplete observational social data
- Ethics of computational research on human behavior
- Novel digital data and/or computational analyses for addressing societal challenges
- Social news curation and collaborative filtering
- Infrastructure to facilitate industry/academic cooperation in computational social science
The IC²S² conference is deeply connected to the field of Language Technology, particularly through its focus on large language models (LLMs), natural language processing (NLP), and computational text analysis applied to social phenomena. Numerous sessions and posters—including topics such as LLM bias, annotation, synthetic data, political discourse, misinformation, and semantic analysis—demonstrate how language technologies are leveraged to understand, model, and interpret complex social dynamics at scale.
Here are some slides from one of the very interesting sessions on "LLMs and BIAS" and also a picture of my poster, co-authored together with Daniel Wojahn and Johan Järlehed, on the topic of "Segregation in Swedish Media Texts: An Initial Exploration Using BERTopic".
The Poster (above); Images from the session: "LLMs and BIAS"
Acknowledgements
My participation in the IC²S²-conference was made possible through the kind support of the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences in Gothenburg - Kungliga Vetenskaps- och Vitterhets-Samhället i Göteborg.