arXiv:2601. 13317v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Climate discourse online shapes public understanding of climate change and informs political and policy debate, yet it unfolds across structurally different environments: paid advertising platforms host targeted, institutionally produced messaging, while public social media reflects largely organic, user-driven discussion.
By Samantha Sudhoff, Pranav Perumal, Zhaoqing Wu, Tunazzina Islam
The paper presents an end‑to‑end framework for extracting and clustering trilingual Sri Lankan parliamentary debates in Sinhala, Tamil, and English. Using LLM‑based text extraction, multilingual embeddings, and density‑based clustering, the authors recover 30 macro‑topics with a cluster purity of 0.673. The temporal patterns of these topics align with major national events such as the 2019 Easter attacks and the 2022 economic crisis, demonstrating the method’s effectiveness where traditional LDA fails.
By Himath Dhanapala, Haren Daishika, Himandhi Kuruppu, Sithija Seneviratne, Ashini Kavindya, Patalee Narasinghe, Sandeepa Weerasekara, Nisansa de Silva, Sandareka Wickramanayake
The paper introduces a new method that uses embedding-based dynamic topic modeling to detect and measure topic drift at the comment level in a large dataset. By applying pretrained language models to generate contextualized embeddings for 12.7 billion Reddit comments from 2006 to 2022, the authors identify evolving topic clusters over time using unsupervised techniques. Their approach includes scalable modifications to existing methods and a null model comparison test, revealing that politically and socially contentious topics show significant directional drift, while areas like music and sports remain relatively stable.
Enthymemes, arguments with unstated premises or conclusions, are pervasive in persuasive discourse, yet their annotation remains notoriously subjective. We present a resource of 1,482 tweets from politically controversial discourse, annotated by five annotators for the presence of enthymemes and their argument structure, designed to study label variation.
arXiv:2510. 18908v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Social media platforms such as Twitter (now X) provide rich data for analyzing public discourse, especially during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
By Wangjiaxuan Xin, Shuhua Yin, Shi Chen, Yaorong Ge
The paper introduces an unsupervised framework that identifies and characterizes competing narratives in political discourse on social media, specifically analyzing German politicians' tweets. It uses a multi‑stage pipeline incorporating topic modeling, event detection, and event linking to form coherent stories and reveal distinct user community perspectives. Two case studies on polarizing issues demonstrate the method’s effectiveness in uncovering divergent viewpoints and framing conflicts around trending political topics.
By Sergej Wildemann, Erick Elejalde
arXiv:2606.12186v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Enthymemes, arguments with unstated premises or conclusions, are pervasive in persuasive discourse, yet their annotation remains notoriously subjec...
By Martial Pastor, Nelleke Oostdijk
The paper introduces a retrieval‑augmented framework for detecting and classifying fallacies in political debate transcripts. By dynamically retrieving documents guided by argumentative relations of support and attack, the method leverages external knowledge to improve performance. Experiments on the ElecDeb60to20 benchmark show significant gains, raising macro‑F1 to 0.864 for detection and 0.725 for classification compared to non‑retrieval baselines.
By Deborah Dore, Greta Damo, Elena Cabrio, Serena Villata
arXiv:2508. 03250v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The increasing amount of political debates and politics-related discussions calls for the definition of novel computational methods to automatically analyse such content with the final goal of lightening up political deliberation to citizens.
By Deborah Dore, Elena Cabrio, Serena Villata
arXiv:2608. 05155v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional sentiment analysis (SA) models, while effective for polarity classification, provide limited insight into the rhetorical, ideological, and framing dimensions of political discourse -- dimensions that are central to research in the social sciences and humanities (SSH).
By Maryam Fooladi, Federico Bottino
BERTilda is an explainable framework for tracking topic lifecycles in longitudinal text streams. It discovers topics independently in each time window using an embedding‑based topic model, then links topics across adjacent windows via a temporal graph that uses both semantic similarity and a bidirectional coverage signal derived from tweet‑to‑topic attribution. The graph‑based rules identify continuations, splits, merges, disappearances, and unclear transitions, and the method achieves up to 87% agreement with human annotators on a gold‑standard subset.
By Cl\'audia Oliveira, \'Alvaro Figueira
arXiv:2609.38256v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to answer questions about politically contentious issues, yet evaluations typically treat a model's...
By Olivia Macmillan-Scott, Michael Jacobs, Nils Metternich, Mirco Musolesi