5 papers
Computational conceptual history of scientific concepts: From early digital methods to LLMs
Michael Zichert, Arno Simons
This article situates large language models (LLMs) within the longer history of computational approaches to concept analysis in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science (H…
Scaling In, Not Up? Testing Thick Citation Context Analysis with GPT-5 and Fragile Prompts
Arno Simons
This paper tests whether large language models (LLMs) can support interpretative citation context analysis (CCA) by scaling in thick, text-grounded readings of a single hard case r…
Large Language Models for History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science: Interpretive Uses, Methodological Challenges, and Critical Perspectives
Arno Simons, Michael Zichert, Adrian Wüthrich
This paper explores the use of large language models (LLMs) as research tools in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science (HPSS). LLMs are remarkably effective at processi…
Astro-HEP-BERT: A bidirectional language model for studying the meanings of concepts in astrophysics and high energy physics
Arno Simons
I present Astro-HEP-BERT, a transformer-based language model specifically designed for generating contextualized word embeddings (CWEs) to study the meanings of concepts in astroph…
Meaning at the Planck scale? Contextualized word embeddings for doing history, philosophy, and sociology of science
Arno Simons
This paper explores the potential of contextualized word embeddings (CWEs) as a new tool in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science (HPSS) for studying contextual and evo…