On May 8, Paul Balluff successfully defended his dissertation, Applications of Transformer Models in Communication Research. In his work, he provides a comprehensive analysis of the strengths, limitations, and challenges of transformer models, and demonstrates their practical applications for research questions in communication science.
Paul defended his dissertation before the committee consisting of Mario Haim and Katharina Kleinen-von Königslöw, chaired by Sophie Lecheler, alongside his advisors Hajo Boomgaarden and Annie Waldherr, as well as colleagues from the CCL. In his responses, Paul demonstrated deep methodological expertise and a thoughtful, critical perspective on the use of transformer-based language models in communication research.
The first two studies from his cumulative dissertation have been published and are available open access:
Balluff, P., Boomgaarden, H. G., & Waldherr, A. (2024). Automatically Finding Actors in Texts: A Performance Review of Multilingual Named Entity Recognition Tools. Communication Methods and Measures, 18(4), 371–389. doi.org/10.1080/19312458.2024.2324789
Balluff, P., Eberl, J.-M., Oberhänsli, S. J., Bernhard-Harrer, J., Boomgaarden, H. G., Fahr, A., & Huber, M. (2026). The Austrian Political Advertisement Scandal: Patterns of “Journalism for Sale”. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 31(1), 91-117. doi.org/10.1177/19401612241285672
Warm congratulations to Paul on this outstanding achievement and an important contribution to communication research!
