arXiv Computation and Language

Beyond the Black Box: Integrating Lexical and Semantic Methods in Quantitative Discourse Analysis with BERTopic

The paper introduces a transparent, hybrid framework for Quantitative Discourse Analysis that blends lexical and semantic techniques. Using custom Python pipelines with NLTK, spaCy, and Sentence Transformers, the authors fine‑tune preprocessing, lemmatisation, and embedding generation, then apply an iterative BERTopic workflow involving UMAP, HDBSCAN, and c‑TF‑IDF to produce coherent topics. The approach is illustrated through a historical political discourse case study, emphasizing code‑level transparency, researcher control, and methodological triangulation.

arXiv AI
Aug 24

Trilingual Topic Modeling of Sri Lankan Parliamentary Debates

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
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 21

From DQI to C-DQI: Automatic Codebook Generation and Evaluation for Measuring Computational Discourse Quality Index

The paper introduces a protocol for generating and evaluating codebooks for measuring Computational Discourse Quality Index (DQI) using Large Language Models (LLMs). It compares top‑down, bottom‑up, and hybrid approaches, finding that inductive, data‑driven schemas yield higher inter‑model agreement while remaining valid. Experiments on 100 Israeli parliament transcripts support the reliability of these data‑driven schemas for large‑scale political discourse analysis.

By Esther Shizgal, Ron Keinan, Daniel Shtauber, Roee Tzvi Esquira, Ori Aronson, Matan Toledano, Or Rappel-Kroyzer, Liron Lavi, Renana Keydar, Ittai Bar-Siman-Tov, Reut Tsarfaty
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 24

Granuscore: A Reference-Free Measure of Granularity for Text Analysis and Question Answering

Granuscore is a reference‑free metric that measures the granularity of text by exploiting the structure of a hierarchical embedding space. It successfully reproduces known hierarchical orderings on the Granola‑EQ dataset, distinguishes granularity across different discourse contexts, and explains sentence‑specificity variations beyond sentence length. The authors also apply Granuscore to four question‑answering benchmarks, revealing systematic differences in granularity among questions, gold answers, and model outputs, thereby offering a new lens for assessing QA dataset difficulty.

By Lukas Ellinger, Alexander Fichtl, Miriam Ansch\"utz, Georg Groh
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 10

A Resource for Enthymeme Detection in Controversial Political Discourse

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 AI
Jun 17

RooseBERT: A New Deal For Political Language Modelling

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 Computation and Language
Sep 17

Structured Claim-Level Discourse Representations for Dense Health Narratives

The paper introduces a structured framework for claim-level discourse analysis in dense health narratives, addressing the limitations of existing topic- or sentiment-based representations. It identifies an average of 13.22 atomic claims per minute in social media health videos and proposes tuples that link each claim to thematic aspects, stance, and multidimensional pragmatic attributes. A benchmark of 1,191 manually annotated claims from 60 videos across four health domains is created, and experiments show that large language models perform well on thematic categorization and stance prediction but struggle with high-dimensional pragmatic profiling, indicating a need for task-specific inference strategies.

By Farnoushsadat Nilizadeh, Elham Pourabbas Vafa, Shirin Nilizadeh, Eduard Dragut
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

Who Argues What? Joint Argument-Entity Detection and Classification in Political Debates

The paper introduces DNE‑ElecDeb, an enriched version of the USElecDeb dataset that annotates Debate Named Entities (DNEs) in both argumentative and non‑argumentative spans, and defines Debate Named Entity Recognition (DNER) as a new task. It proposes Joint Argument and Entity Tagging (JAET), a generative framework that fine‑tunes decoder‑only LLMs to insert inline argument and entity tags into debate turns while preserving the original transcript. JAET achieves significant improvements in joint AM+DNER performance (+27.3% relative F1 in the untyped setting and +41.9% in the typed setting) over sequential pipelines, and these gains generalize to Persuasive Essays (+26.6% and +52.7%).

By Lucio La Cava, Stefano Francesco Monea, Sergio Greco