The First Ateneo-NAIST Cross-Cultural Workshop on Perspectives in Social Computing Research

Language, Models & Social Computing

Language is social. It enables us to communicate with one another. Language is also cultural as there are intricacies in its evolution and use making some aspects unique to one culture. Language is universal. Online spaces provide limitless capability to use language in creating conversations that connect individuals to one another forming communities addressing a common goal. This one-day workshop is designed to discover and understand perspectives in Social Computing research from the Social Computing Science Laboratories of the Ateneo de Manila University and the Nara Institute for Science and Technology thereby creating a collaborative space for current and future research. Discussion will include best practices in how social computing research attempts to understand universal, social, and cultural aspects of language in online narratives, conversations, and texts.

A special panel discussion on the future of social computing with large language models will be held gathering distinguished women in the field of Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence

Workshop Program

09:00 – 10:00	Coffee Connection and Chit-chats
10:00 – 10:20	Greeting Galore!
10:20 – 12:00	Meet Our Protégés – Paper Presentations
12:00 – 13:00	Midday Munchies
13:00 – 14:00	The Rise of LLMs: A Discussion with Leaders in the Field
14:00 – 16:00	Workshop Tango
16:00 – 17:00	Last Curtain Call & Synthesis

The Rise of LLMs: A Discussion with Leaders in the Field

With the Large Language Models (LLMs) being made more available to the general public, the excitement on its use has also spread across a variety of research fields including medicine, sociology or computer science. While researchers in various disciplines seem to be cautiously optimistic in implementing such models in their studies, some challenges await and should be thoroughly considered before we design our studies using LLMs. We examine key opportunities and challenges faced by social computing researchers in conducting social computational studies using LLMs with the goal of providing guidelines on utilization and implementation of LLMs in Social Computing Studies.