ELTE Research Center for Computational Social Science

Overview

INTRODUCTION

The ELTE Research Center for Computational Social Science (ELTE RC2S2) was established at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Eötvös Loránd University in 2018. Our research group aims to exploit computational social science to discover content-based sociological knowledge and develop new methods, with the intention of contributing to practice-oriented solutions to social issues.

Our research topics are diverse: the status and applications of data science in the social sciences; analysis of online forums on depression, political polarization, and political publicity; the politics of memory; online hate speech; analysis of historical documents; and sustainability discourses. We are convinced that computational trends will be inescapable in sociology over the coming decades.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 

Computational Methods
Computational methods include data science (machine learning, text analytics), network analysis, and data visualization. The main focus of our research group is natural language processing, with research experience in analyzing Hungarian- and English-language textual data available online or in digital form, as well as historical documents.

Survey Methods
We aim to redefine social research methods by the organic incorporation of data science know-how into survey methods and the combined application of qualitative and quantitative analysis. Survey data and digital data together may provide social research with a flexible, broad enough empirical base.

Social Theory Building
We focus on conducting empirical research instead of using a data-driven approach. We use knowledge-driven science for theory building.

GRANTS

CENTRAL (Central European Network for Teaching and Research in Academic Liaison)
Ildikó Barna, PhD – The Power of Voices and Silences (2025)
Ildikó Barna, PhD – Materialities of Memory in Central, East, and South-East Europe (2024)
Ildikó Barna, PhD – Transformation of Memory Cultures and Politics (2023)
Ildikó Barna, PhD – Notion and construction of victimhood in Central East and Southeast Europe (2022)
Ildikó Barna, PhD – Memory policy in theoretical and practical dimensions (2021)

ELTE Faculty of Social Sciences Incubator Grant
Ildikó Barna, PhD – Narratives in the Public Sphere: The Discursive Representation of the Russia–Ukraine War (2025–2026)

Central Europe Leuven Strategic Alliance (CELSA)
Ildikó Barna, PhD – Representations of Migration in a Transforming Europe: The Polarising Power of Migration as a Political Tool in Online Media and Political Discourses – What can we learn from the 2015 and 2022 refugee crises?” (2023–2025)

Erasmus + Jean Monnet Network
Ildikó Barna, PhD – European Memory Politics – Populism, Nationalism, and the Challenges to a European Memory Culture (2020–2023)

Anonymous Grant
Ildikó Barna, PhD – Revisiting Early Testimonies of Hungarian Jewish Holocaust Survivors through a Digital Lens (2021–2024)

National Laboratory for Social Innovation
Domonkos Sik, PhD – Mapping and optimalization of online depression forums (2021–2022)

National Research, Development and Innovation Office
Renáta Németh, PhD – The layers of the political public sphere in Hungary (2001–2020) (2020–2023)

New National Excellence Program (NNEP) and University Research Scholarship Program (URSP)
Doctoral and postdoctoral students involved in our research have been awarded several NNEP and URSP grants, on topics such as Analysis of public procurement tender texts using NLP, Analysis of Emotions Related to Twentieth Century Traumas Using Text Analytical Methods, Examining the linguistic and political polarization of parliamentary speeches, and Sustainability in online media platforms.

Research group members

  • Ildikó BARNA, PhD, co−leader of Research Group, Department of Social Research Methodology, Faculty of Social Sciences, ELTE

  • Renáta NÉMETH, PhD, co−leader of Research Group, Department of Statistics, Faculty of Social Sciences, ELTE

  • Domonkos SIK, PhD, senior researcher, Department of Social Theory, Faculty of Social Sciences, ELTE

  • Eszter KATONA, PhD, senior researcher, Department of Social Research Methodology, Faculty of Social Sciences, ELTE

  • Jakab BUDA, junior researcher, Department of Statistics, Faculty of Social Sciences, ELTE

  • Márton RAKOVICS, junior researcher, Department of Statistics, Faculty of Social Sciences, ELTE

  • Zsófia RAKOVICS, junior researcher, Department of Social Research Methodology, Faculty of Social Sciences, ELTE

  • Alexandra M. SZABÓ, junior researcher

  • Tímea Emese TÓTH, junior researcher, Department of Social Research Methodology, Faculty of Social Sciences, ELTE

  • Márton GOSZTONYI, PhD, Department of Social Research Methodology, Faculty of Social Sciences, ELTE
  • Anna UNGER, Department of Human Rights and Politics, Faculty of Social Sciences, ELTE

Keywords

computational social science, natural language processing, text mining, data science, online hate speech, language polarisation, memory politics  

News and Events 

On the website and the Facebook page of the research group.

Outputs

The following publications are partly linked to the group with all their authors, partly only with one or a few co-authors.

Németh, Renáta ; Katona, Eszter ; Balogh, Péter ; Rakovics, Zsófia ; Unger, Anna 
What else comes with a geographical concept beyond geography? The renaissance of the term ‘Carpathian Basin’ in the Hungarian Parliament
INTERSECTIONS: EAST EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF SOCIETY AND POLITICS 11 : 1 pp. 3-39. , 37 p. (2025)

Eszter, Katona ; Renáta, Németh ; Anna, Unger 
The Evolution of the ‘Carpathian Basin’ Discourse in the Hungarian Parliament (1998–2020)
PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIETY / FILOZOFIJA I DRUSTVO 36 : 2 pp. 437-460. , 24 p. (2025)

Németh, Renáta; Tátrai, Annamária ; Szabó, Miklós ; Zaletnyik, Péter Tibor ; Tamási, Árpád 
Exploring the use of retrieval-augmented generation models in higher education: A pilot study on artificial intelligence-based tutoring
SOCIAL SCIENCES & HUMANITIES OPEN 12 p. 101751 Paper: 101751 , 10 p. (2025)

Sik, Domonkos ; Németh, Renáta ; Barna, Ildikó ; Gessler, Theresa ; Vincze, Hanna Orsolya 
Editorial: Preface to the special issue ‘Text as data’ – Eastern and Central European political discourses from the perspective of computational social science (part 2)
INTERSECTIONS: EAST EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF SOCIETY AND POLITICS 11 : 1 pp. 1-2. , 2 p. (2025)

Németh, Renáta 
Content analysis and natural language processing 
In: Elsevier Reference module in social sciences Amsterdam, Hollandia : Elsevier (2022)

Czuprák, Nikolett ; Németh, Renáta 
The IKEA effect in human-AI collaboration: Does the effect exist for non-physical products? Part I.
MARKETING SCIENCE & INSPIRATIONS 3 pp. 2-6. , 5 p. (2025)

Németh, Renáta ; Sik, Domonkos ; Zaboretzky, Bendegúz ; Katona, Eszter 
Depression in times of a pandemic – the impact of COVID-19 on the lay discourses of e-mental health communities
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION AND SOCIETY 27 : 3 pp. 538-560. , 23 p. (2024)

Orosz, Gábor; Faragó, Laura; Paskuj, Benedek ; Rakovics, Zsófia ; Sam-Mine, Diane ; Audemard, Gilles ; Modeliar, Mouny Samy ; Krekó, Péter 
Softly empowering a prosocial expert in the family: lasting effects of a counter-misinformation intervention in an informational autocracy
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS 14 : 1 Paper: 11763 , 13 p. (2024)

Németh, Renáta ; Sik, Domonkos 
Beyond “latent thematic structure”: Expanding the interpretation of the topic model towards pragmatics
INTERSECTIONS: EAST EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF SOCIETY AND POLITICS 10 : 4 pp. 148-159. , 12 p. (2024)

Rakovics, Zsófia ; Rakovics, Márton 
Exploring the potential and limitations of large language models as virtual respondents for social science research
INTERSECTIONS: EAST EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF SOCIETY AND POLITICS 10 : 4 pp. 126-147. , 22 p. (2024)

Szalay, Áron ; Rakovics, Zsófia 
Tuned to Fear: Analyzing Viktor Orbán’s State of the Nation Addresses, focusing on the enemy images identified in the National Consultation
INTERSECTIONS: EAST EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF SOCIETY AND POLITICS 11 : 1 pp. 165-184. , 20 p. (2024)

Sik, Domonkos ; Rakovics, Márton ; Németh, Renáta 
The Manifest and Latent Structures of Medicalization and Psychologization in Lay Depression Discourses — A Word Embedding Analysis of Online Forums
JOURNAL OF TECHNOLOGY IN BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE - : 10 pp. 411-423. , 13 p. (2024)

Buda, Jakab Máté ; Németh, Renáta 
A felügyelt gépi tanulás alkalmazási lehetőségei szöveges adatokon. A magyar országgyűlésben 1998–2018 között elhangzott beszédek elemzése
STATISZTIKAI SZEMLE 102 : 11 pp. 1087-1103. , 17 p. (2024)

Németh, Renáta ; Tátrai, Annamária ; Szabó, Miklós ; Tamási, Árpád 
Using a RAG-enhanced large language model in a virtual teaching assistant role: Experiences from a pilot project in statistics education
HUNGARIAN STATISTICAL REVIEW 7 : 2 pp. 3-27. , 25 p. (2024)

Rakovics, Zsófia ; Barna, Ildikó 
Jobbik’s journey from radicalism to mainstream politics: Analyzing the parliamentary speeches of Jobbik and the dynamic network of its politicians
INTERSECTIONS: EAST EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF SOCIETY AND POLITICS 10 : 4 pp. 82-105. , 24 p. (2024)

Buda, Jakab ; Németh, Renáta ; Simonovits, Bori ; Simonovits, Gábor 
The language of discrimination: assessing attention discrimination by Hungarian local governments
LANGUAGE RESOURCES AND EVALUATION 57 : 4 pp. 1547-1570. , 24 p. (2023)

Németh, Renáta 
A scoping review on the use of natural language processing in research on political polarization: trends and research prospects
Journal of Computational Social Science 6 pp. 289-313. , 25 p. (2023)

Németh, Renáta ; Koltai, Júlia 
Natural language processing: The integration of a new methodological paradigm into sociology
INTERSECTIONS: EAST EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF SOCIETY AND POLITICS 9 : 1 pp. 5-22. , 18 p. (2023)

Sik, Endre ; Buda, Jakab 
Bizalom a háztartásban
SZOCIOLÓGIAI SZEMLE 33 : 1 pp. 55-66. , 12 p. (2023)

Máté-Tóth, András; Rakovics, Zsófia 
The Discourse of Christianity in Viktor Orbán's Rhetoric
RELIGIONS 14 : 8 Paper: 1035 , 21 p. (2023)

Rakovics, Zsófia 
Az emlékezetpolitikai témák megjelenése és dinamikája az Országgyűlésben: Parlamenti felszólalások elemzése strukturális topikmodellezéssel
KÖTŐ-JELEK 2023 pp. 79-95. , 17 p. (2023)

Barna, Ildikó ; Knap, Árpád 
Analysis of the Thematic Structure and Discursive Framing in Articles about Trianon and the Holocaust in the Online Hungarian Press Using LDA Topic Modelling
NATIONALITIES PAPERS 51 : 3 pp. 603-621. , 19 p. (2022)

Rakovics, Zsófia 
Oksági következtetések: A statisztikaelmélettől a társadalomtudományi alkalmazásokig és vissza
SZOCIOLÓGIAI SZEMLE 32 : 3 pp. 113-120. , 8 p. (2022)

Boda, Zsuzsanna ; Rakovics, Zsófia 
Orbán Viktor 2010 és 2020 közötti beszédeinek elemzése : A migráció témájának vizsgálata
SZOCIOLÓGIAI SZEMLE 32 : 4 pp. 46-69. , 24 p. (2022)

Knap, Árpád ; Tóth, Tímea Emese ; Rakovics, Zsófia 
Humán annotált emóciókorpusz létrehozása aktorokhoz köthető érzelmek detektálására
DIGITÁLIS BÖLCSÉSZET 6 pp. 3-17. , 15 p. (2022)

Katona, Eszter ; Németh, Renáta 
Automatizált szöveganalitika a korrupció kutatásában
SOCIO.HU : TÁRSADALOMTUDOMÁNYI SZEMLE 11 : 1 pp. 108-124. , 17 p. (2021)

Csomor, Gábor ; Simonovits, Borbála ; Németh, Renáta 
Hivatali diszkrimináció?: Egy online terepkísérlet eredményei
SZOCIOLÓGIAI SZEMLE 31 : 1 pp. 4-28. , 25 p. (2021)

Katona, Eszter ; Kmetty, Zoltán ; Németh, Renáta 
A korrupció hazai online média-reprezentációjának vizsgálata természetes nyelvfeldolgozással
MÉDIAKUTATÓ: MÉDIAELMÉLETI FOLYÓIRAT 22 : 2 pp. 69-88. , 20 p. (2021)

Németh, Renáta 
A felügyelt gépi tanulás kihívásai a szociológiai alkalmazásokban
METSZETEK: TÁRSADALOMTUDOMÁNYI FOLYÓIRAT 10 : 3 pp. 27-42. , 11 p. (2021)

Máté, Fanni ; Katona, Eszter ; Knap, Árpád ; Csótó, Mihály
Az Információs Társadalomban megjelenő tanulmányok topikelemzése: Boldog születésnapot, Információs Társadalom!
INFORMÁCIÓS TÁRSADALOM: TÁRSADALOMTUDOMÁNYI FOLYÓIRAT 21 : 1 pp. 10-47. , 38 p. (2021)

Árpád, Knap ; Diána, Bartha ; Ildikó, Barna 
Trianon és a holokauszt emlékezetpolitikai jellegzetességeinek elemzése természetesnyelv-feldolgozás használatával
SZOCIOLÓGIAI SZEMLE 31 : 4 pp. 28-62. , 35 p. (2021)

Németh, Renáta ; Barna, Ildikó 
Digitális társadalomkutatások az ELTE-n: Beszámoló A társadalom kutatásának új útjai című workshop digitális társadalomkutatással foglalkozó szekcióiról
SZOCIOLÓGIAI SZEMLE 29 : 4 pp. 115-121. , 7 p. (2019)

Contact information (leaders)

Ildikó BARNA
Phd (co-leader)
Department of Social Research Methodology
Faculty of Social Sciences, Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest (ELTE)  
barna.ildiko@tatk.elte.hu

Renáta NÉMETH
Phd (co-leader)
Department of Statistics
Faculty of Social Sciences, Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest (ELTE)
nemeth.renata@tatk.elte.hu