Our Research Assistant Mehdi Sosar Delivers Erasmus+ Seminars at the University of Belgrade

Our Department's Research Assistant Mehdi Sosar, delivered a two-session seminar series as a guest researcher at the Centre for International Security (CIS-FPN), Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Belgrade, within the scope of the Erasmus+ Staff Training Mobility between Antalya Bilim University and the University of Belgrade.

In the first session, entitled "Role Theory in Foreign Policy Analysis," Mehdi Sosar examined the current state of role theory research, highlighting that the field continues to rely predominantly on qualitative and descriptive approaches. He emphasized that this presents a significant opportunity for Computational Social Science (CSS) methods to contribute to the study of role theory.

In the second session, which focused on the intersection of "Computational Social Science and Foreign Policy," Sosar introduced the methodological toolkit required to apply CSS to political texts. Explaining the differences between Classical Machine Learning and Deep Learning, he presented the fundamentals of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Transformer architectures to the participants. He concluded the seminar by presenting his research evaluating the performance of BERTurk, a language model trained for Turkish, in classifying speeches by Turkish political leaders according to their National Role Conceptions.

Political Science and International Relations

Our Research Assistant Mehdi Sosar Delivers Erasmus+ Seminars at the University of Belgrade