Solomon Messing

Patrick Y. Wu, Jonathan Nagler, Joshua A. Tucker et al.

Existing approaches to estimating politicians' latent positions along specific dimensions often fail when relevant data is limited. We leverage the embedded knowledge in generative large language models (LLMs) to address this challenge and measure lawmakers' positions along specific political or policy dimensions. We prompt an instruction/dialogue-tuned LLM to pairwise compare lawmakers and then scale the resulting graph using the Bradley-Terry model. We estimate novel measures of U.S. senators' positions on liberal-conservative ideology, gun control, and abortion. Our liberal-conservative scale, used to validate LLM-driven scaling, strongly correlates with existing measures and offsets interpretive gaps, suggesting LLMs synthesize relevant data from internet and digitized media rather than memorizing existing measures. Our gun control and abortion measures -- the first of their kind -- differ from the liberal-conservative scale in face-valid ways and predict interest group ratings and legislator votes better than ideology alone. Our findings suggest LLMs hold promise for solving complex social science measurement problems.

Patrick Y. Wu, Jonathan Nagler, Joshua A. Tucker et al.

Existing text scoring methods require a large corpus, struggle with short texts, or require hand-labeled data. We develop a text scoring framework that leverages generative large language models (LLMs) to (1) set texts against the backdrop of information from the near-totality of the web and digitized media, and (2) effectively transform pairwise text comparisons from a reasoning problem to a pattern recognition task. Our approach, concept-guided chain-of-thought (CGCoT), utilizes a chain of researcher-designed prompts with an LLM to generate a concept-specific breakdown for each text, akin to guidance provided to human coders. We then pairwise compare breakdowns using an LLM and aggregate answers into a score using a probability model. We apply this approach to better understand speech reflecting aversion to specific political parties on Twitter, a topic that has commanded increasing interest because of its potential contributions to democratic backsliding. We achieve stronger correlations with human judgments than widely used unsupervised text scoring methods like Wordfish. In a supervised setting, besides a small pilot dataset to develop CGCoT prompts, our measures require no additional hand-labeled data and produce predictions on par with RoBERTa-Large fine-tuned on thousands of hand-labeled tweets. This project showcases the potential of combining human expertise and LLMs for scoring tasks.

Solomon Messing

LLM evaluations drive which models get deployed, which safety standards get adopted, and which research conclusions get published. Yet these scores carry hidden uncertainty: rephrasing the prompt, switching the judge model, or changing the temperature can shift results enough to flip rankings and reverse conclusions. Standard confidence intervals ignore this variance, producing under-coverage that worsens with more data. The same unmeasured variance creates an exploitable surface for benchmarks: model developers can optimize against measurement noise rather than genuine performance (some have infamously done so, see \citep{boyeau2025leaderboard}). This paper decomposes LLM pipeline uncertainty into its sources, distinguishes variance that shrinks with more data from sensitivity to researcher design choices, and uses design-study projections to reduce total error. Across ideology annotation, safety classification, MMLU benchmarking, and a human-validated propaganda audit, the decomposition reveals that the dominant variance source differs by domain and scoring method. On MMLU, optimized budget allocation halves estimation error at equivalent cost. On the propaganda task, the recommended pipeline outperforms 73\% of single-configuration alternatives against a human baseline. A small-sample pilot is sufficient to derive confidence intervals that approach nominal coverage and to identify which design changes yield the largest precision gains.

Daniel Kifer, Solomon Messing, Aaron Roth et al.

Differential privacy is an information theoretic constraint on algorithms and code. It provides quantification of privacy leakage and formal privacy guarantees that are currently considered the gold standard in privacy protections. In this paper we provide an initial set of "best practices" for developing differentially private platforms, techniques for unit testing that are specific to differential privacy, guidelines for checking if differential privacy is being applied correctly in an application, and recommendations for parameter settings. The genesis of this paper was an initiative by Facebook and Social Science One to provide social science researchers with programmatic access to a URL-shares dataset. In order to maximize the utility of the data for research while protecting privacy, researchers should access the data through an interactive platform that supports differential privacy. The intention of this paper is to provide guidelines and recommendations that can generally be re-used in a wide variety of systems. For this reason, no specific platforms will be named, except for systems whose details and theory appear in academic papers.