22.10.24: Christopher Klamm on “AI Conversational Interviewing: Transforming Surveys with LLMs as Adaptive Interviewers”

Prof. Dr. Karsten Donnay together with the DSI Democracy Community will host Christopher Klamm (University of Mannheim) in the third week of October.

On Tuesday, October 22, 2024 at 10:00-11:30 (Room AFL-E-003 in Oerlikon) Christopher Klamm will give a talk on “AI Conversational Interviewing: Transforming Surveys with LLMs as Adaptive Interviewers” based on a recent working paper co-authored with Alexander Wuttke, Matthias Assenmacher, Max Lang, Quirin Würschinger and Frauke Kreuter.

Please find an abstract below:

Traditional methods for eliciting people’s opinions face a trade-off between depth and scale: structured surveys enable large-scale data collection but limit respondents’ ability to express unanticipated thoughts in their own words, while conversational interviews provide deeper insights but are resource-intensive. This study explores the potential of replacing human interviewers with large language models (LLMs) to conduct scalable conversational interviews. Our goal is to assess the performance of AI Conversational Interviewing and to identify opportunities for improvement in a controlled environment. We conducted a small-scale, in-depth study with university students who were randomly assigned to be interviewed by either AI or human interviewers, both employing identical questionnaires on political topics. Various quantitative and qualitative measures assessed interviewer adherence to guidelines, response quality, participant engagement, and overall interview efficacy. The findings indicate the viability of AI Conversational Interviewing in producing quality data comparable to traditional methods, with the added benefit of scalability. Based on our experiences, we present specific recommendations for effective implementation.

We look forward to seeing you there!