Deceptively simple: An outsider's perspective on natural language processing

Abstract This article highlights a collection of ideas with an underlying deceptive simplicity that addresses several practical challenges in computational social science and generative AI safety. These ideas lead to (1) an interpretable and quantifiable framework for political polarization; (2) a language identifier robust to noisy social media text settings; (3) a cross‐lingual semantic sampler that harnesses code‐switching; and (4) a bias audit framework that uncovers shocking racism, antisemitism, misogyny, and other biases in a wide suite of large language models.