poltextLAB is an artificial intelligence laboratory and research unit of the ELTE Centre for Social Sciences, Budapest. Founded and directed by Research Professor Dr Miklós Sebők, the lab brings together a multidisciplinary team of political scientists, economists, computer scientists, and project managers united by a shared mission: advancing the application of AI agent systems and natural language processing to social science research. Its flagship infrastructure, The Babel Machine, is a multilingual text classification platform serving several hundred institutional users globally, capable of processing hundreds of thousands of documents across eleven languages in minutes rather than months.

The lab has secured and led over €1.8 million in competitive research funding from the European Union Horizon programme, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and the National Research, Development and Innovation Office (NKFIH), and has contributed to major international data infrastructures including ParlLawSpeech, ParlText, and the Hungarian Comparative Agendas Project. The lab has published its research findings in leading international journals, including Political Analysis, Journal of European Public Policy, and Social Science Computer Review. poltextLAB is a co-organiser of the annual COMPTEXT Conference and, through its training programmes, bridges the scholarly and practitioner communities working at the frontier of computational social science.