Jens Rupprecht
2026
QSTN: A Modular Framework for Robust Questionnaire Inference with Large Language Models
Maximilian Kreutner | Jens Rupprecht | Georg Ahnert | Ahmed Salem | Markus Strohmaier
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)
Maximilian Kreutner | Jens Rupprecht | Georg Ahnert | Ahmed Salem | Markus Strohmaier
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)
We introduce QSTN, an open-source Python framework for systematically generating responses from questionnaire-style prompts to support in-silico surveys and annotation tasks with large language models (LLMs). QSTN enables robust evaluation of questionnaire presentation, prompt perturbations, and response generation methods. Our extensive evaluation (>40 million survey responses) shows that question structure and response generation methods have a significant impact on the alignment of generated survey responses with human answers. We also find that answers can be obtained for a fraction of the compute cost, by changing the presentation method. In addition, we offer a no-code user interface that allows researchers to set up robust experiments with LLMs without coding knowledge. We hope that QSTN will support the reproducibility and reliability of LLM-based research in the future.