The exponential growth of textual data—ranging from social media posts and digital news archives to speech-to-text transcripts—has opened new frontiers for research in the social sciences. Tasks such as stance detection, topic classification, and information extraction have become increasingly common. At the same time, the rapid evolution of Natural Language Processing, especially pretrained language models and generative AI, has largely been led by the computer science community, often leaving a gap in accessibility for social scientists.

To address this, we initiated since 2023 the development of ActiveTigger, a lightweight, open-source Python application (with a web frontend in React) designed to accelerate annotation process and manage large-scale datasets through the integration of fine-tuned models. It aims to support computational social science for a large public both within and outside social sciences. Already used by a dynamic community in social sciences, the stable version is planned for early June 2025.

From a more technical prospect, the API is designed to manage the complete workflow from project creation, embeddings computation, exploration of the text corpus, human annotation with active learning, fine-tuning of pre-trained models (BERT-like), prediction on a larger corpus, and export. It also integrates LLM-as-a-service capabilities for prompt-based annotation and information extraction, offering a flexible approach for hybrid manual/automatic labeling. Accessible both with a web frontend and a Python client, ActiveTigger encourages customization and adaptation to specific research contexts and practices.

In this talk, we will delve into the motivations behind the creation of ActiveTigger, outline its technical architecture, and walk through its core functionalities. Drawing on several ongoing research projects within the Computational Social Science (CSS) group at CREST, we will illustrate concrete use cases where ActiveTigger has accelerated data annotation, enabled scalable workflows, and fostered collaborations. Beyond the technical demonstration, the talk will also open a broader reflection on the challenges and opportunities brought by generative AI in academic research—especially in terms of reliability, transparency, and methodological adaptation for qualitative and quantitative inquiries.

The repository of the project : https://github.com/emilienschultz/activetigger/

The development of this software is funded by the DRARI Ile-de-France and supported by Progédo.