On November 24th, Professor Hu Nan from Xi’an Jiaotong University was invited to visit the School of Management of Shandong University and shared a lecture titled “Exploring the Way to Carry Out Economic and Management Research with Large Language Models”. The lecture is one of the series of lectures on disciplines and academic innovation of the School, hosted by Tang Guiyao, Vice Dean of the School, and attended by young teachers and master and doctoral students of the School.
Professor Hu reviewed the history and principles of the evolution from Diction to BERT to GPT models, introduced the features and application areas of these models, and emphasized the potential of Large Language Models in understanding and predicting company behaviors. With the rapid development of natural language processing technology, the simple bag-of-words approach based on traditional Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) is insufficient in constructing and revealing deeper concepts, while the emergence of Large Language Models provides new methods to solve the problem. Taking GPT as an example, Professor Hu demonstrated how Large Language Models can provide an innovative approach to cutting-edge research in the field of economics and management, and showed the audience the practical application effect and potential of Large Language Models in economics and management research through specific cases and data analysis. He stressed that Large Language Models can help researchers better understand and analyze large amounts of textual data to extract valuable information and insights and support the decision-making. Finally, Professor Hu pointed out that with the improvement of Large Language Models, the prospect of its application in economic and management research will be even broader. He encouraged the scholars and postgraduate students present to actively explore the application of Large Language Models and raised some questions in order to trigger more discussion and research.
The lecture not only expanded the scenarios and patterns of the application of Large Language Models in economic and management research but also provided new directions for thinking and exploring for the attending scholars and students.
Professor Hu Nan, PhD from the University of Texas at Dallas, is a professor and doctoral supervisor at the School of Management, Xi’an Jiaotong University. His research areas focus on the value of information using a cross-disciplinary approach, including accounting, finance, marketing, information, computing, text mining, deep learning, artificial intelligence, psychology, etc. His research results are used by leading companies in the industry such as Apple and Amazon.
