Thesis Proposal: Measuring Prejudice at Scale

Zoran Fijavž, Senja Pollak, Veronika Bajt


Abstract
This thesis proposal addresses methodological gaps in applying NLP to social science by shifting from categorical classification to comparative scaling of grounded constructs. We first extend predictive capacity on existing specialized political datasets with prompt optimization and distillation approaches. We then develop an active learning framework for efficient comparative annotation to scale latent dimensions from large corpora. Finally, we apply this pipeline to measure benevolent sexism in Slovenian media and migration threat perception in parliamentary discourse. This work establishes a scalable workflow for moving NLP from ad-hoc classification to theoretically grounded comparative measurement.
Anthology ID:
2026.eacl-srw.56
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Selene Baez Santamaria, Sai Ashish Somayajula, Atsuki Yamaguchi
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
760–775
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-srw.56/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zoran Fijavž, Senja Pollak, and Veronika Bajt. 2026. Thesis Proposal: Measuring Prejudice at Scale. In Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop), pages 760–775, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Thesis Proposal: Measuring Prejudice at Scale (Fijavž et al., EACL 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-srw.56.pdf