Humanities-Centred Artificial Intelligence

8 December 2023

Photo: Gwen Melzer

Bridging the gap between computer science and the humanities is the central tenet of the workshop ‘Humanities-Centred Artificial Intelligence’ (CHAI). The proceedings of the third edition of this workshop, held in Berlin in September 2023, are now available open access.

In 2023, it has become abundantly clear that the rapid development of artificial intelligence will fundamentally change the way researchers in every discipline will work in the future. The humanities are not exempt from these changes. Nevertheless, there are still surprisingly few forums in which scholars from the humanities and computer scientists meet and explicitly discuss the opportunities that the methods, questions, and developments in their respective fields yield for the other side. The ‘Humanities-Centred Artificial Intelligence’ (CHAI) workshop is one such forum. Sylvia Melzer and Stefan Thiemann, who are part of the Research Field on Data Linking at the Cluster of Excellence UWA, and Hagen Peukert organised the one-day event already for the third time this year. As in previous years, it took place as part of the German Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the 46th edition of which was held in Berlin from 26 to 29 September 2023.

The five regular and two short papers presented that were presented at CHAI 2023 show the latest applications of AI methods in the humanities, covering a wide range of topics. Among others, Simon Schiff and Ralf and Möller deal with the challenges of reusing data in research archives in their contribution; a group of researchers from computer science and Arabic studies addresses the challenges faced by humanities scholars when finetuning Large Language Models (LLMs) for domain-specific tasks with limited training data; and Hussein Mohammed discusses the potential applications of vision-language models in the context of research on historical written artefacts.

All contributions to CHAI 2023 are now also available open access. The proceedings of the two previous workshops from 2021 and 2022 are also still available online.