A Framework for Enhancing Behavioral Science Research with Human-Guided Language Models

Many behavioral science studies result in large amounts of unstructured data sets that are costly to code and analyze, requiring multiple reviewers to agree on systematically chosen concepts and themes to categorize responses. Large language models (LLMs) have potential to support this work, demonstrating capabilities for categorizing, summarizing, and otherwise organizing unstructured data. In this paper, we consider that although LLMs have the potential to save time and resources performing coding on qualitative data, the implications for behavioral science research are not yet well understood. Model bias and inaccuracies, reliability, and lack of domain knowledge all necessitate continued human guidance. New methods and interfaces must be developed to enable behavioral science researchers to efficiently and systematically categorize unstructured data together with LLMs. We propose a framework for incorporating human feedback into an annotation workflow, leveraging interactive machine learning to provide oversight while improving a language model's predictions over time.