20.500.12556/RUL-185416 Meeting the machines half-way testing LLMs for qualitative coding of values in texts This article reports a small-scale experiment comparing human and Large Language Model (LLM) performance on a difficult qualitative coding task: assigning values to short text snippets. When annotators compared human and model outputs, they consistently preferred the human annotations. However, agreement among human coders was low. To explain this contradiction, we conducted follow-up interviews inspired by Cicourel’s work. The interviews revealed that human coders drew on linguistic nuance, cultural experience, and implicit assumptions about values and about the experiment. These assumptions differed from those underlying LLM outputs. We argue this is not simply a failure of LLMs. Rather, assigning predetermined categories to decontextualized text is inherently difficult for both humans and machines. Human annotators already ‘meet the machines halfway’ by being consistent and formal. Rather than treating LLMs as annotation machines, we propose three collaborative roles for LLMs: generating explanations, retrieving examples from data, and assisting with codebook development. values large language models qualitative coding ecological validity vrednote veliki jezikovni modeli kvalitativno kodiranje ekološka veljavnost true false true Angleški jezik Slovenski jezik Članek v reviji 2026-08-04 12:08:41 2026-08-04 12:08:43 2026-08-05 04:02:15 0000-00-00 00:00:00 2026 0 0 13 str. no. Vol. 2026 0000-00-00 Zaloznikova Objavljeno NiDoloceno 0000-00-00 0000-00-00 0000-00-00 004.8:81'322 0018-7259 10.1080/00187259.2026.2703871 286571779 RAZ_Moats_David_2026.pdf RAZ_Moats_David_2026.pdf 1 0A61335A94E8D3C3BCC95CB16EE6D714 a8abc637e0febb2a47a1ddfebca4073fe62acd3917d84eef4ab7d7699ee94aef 5f15ce75-8fed-11f1-9b0d-0050569b8976 https://repozitorij.uni-lj.si/Dokument.php?lang=slv&id=243904 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00187259.2026.2703871 1 29bed4bc-8fec-11f1-9b0d-0050569b8976 https://repozitorij.uni-lj.si/Dokument.php?lang=slv&id=243901 Fakulteta za računalništvo in informatiko 0 0 0