Toward Responsible and Epistemically Grounded Multilingual LLMs for Computational Social Science and Humanities

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Zaghouani, Wajdi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Zaghouani, Wajdi
author_facet Zaghouani, Wajdi
contents Large language models have rapidly evolved in multilingual competence and reasoning capacity, enabling their integration into Social Sciences and Humanities research workflows. Yet existing evaluation paradigms remain anchored in task-based NLP benchmarks and fail to address interpretive validity, cultural situatedness, and epistemic mediation. This paper reconceptualizes multilingual reasoning LLMs as hermeneutic instruments that actively structure meaning production across linguistic and cultural contexts. Drawing on hermeneutics, philosophy of technology, science and technology studies, multilingual NLP research, and computational social science methodology, we develop a theoretically grounded framework for evaluating multilingual reasoning in Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) research. We articulate a rigorous experimental protocol with operationalized metrics for cultural alignment, cross-lingual stability, and reasoning faithfulness, along with transparency requirements tailored to interpretive research tasks. We illustrate the framework through a concrete application scenario involving multilingual political discourse analysis. The paper contributes a conceptual and methodological foundation for responsible integration of multilingual reasoning LLMs into computational social science infrastructures.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2606_00596
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Toward Responsible and Epistemically Grounded Multilingual LLMs for Computational Social Science and Humanities
Zaghouani, Wajdi
Computation and Language
Large language models have rapidly evolved in multilingual competence and reasoning capacity, enabling their integration into Social Sciences and Humanities research workflows. Yet existing evaluation paradigms remain anchored in task-based NLP benchmarks and fail to address interpretive validity, cultural situatedness, and epistemic mediation. This paper reconceptualizes multilingual reasoning LLMs as hermeneutic instruments that actively structure meaning production across linguistic and cultural contexts. Drawing on hermeneutics, philosophy of technology, science and technology studies, multilingual NLP research, and computational social science methodology, we develop a theoretically grounded framework for evaluating multilingual reasoning in Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) research. We articulate a rigorous experimental protocol with operationalized metrics for cultural alignment, cross-lingual stability, and reasoning faithfulness, along with transparency requirements tailored to interpretive research tasks. We illustrate the framework through a concrete application scenario involving multilingual political discourse analysis. The paper contributes a conceptual and methodological foundation for responsible integration of multilingual reasoning LLMs into computational social science infrastructures.
title Toward Responsible and Epistemically Grounded Multilingual LLMs for Computational Social Science and Humanities
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00596