arXiv AI

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.

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 Machine Learning
Aug 20

BERTilda: Explainable Topic Lifecycle Tracking with Split/Merge Detection via Similarity-and-Flow Temporal Graphs

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 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
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Retrieving Relations, Detecting Fallacies: A RAG Approach to Political Debate Analysis

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 Computation and Language
Sep 10

Beyond Top Words: MonoTM for Topic Modeling with Interpretable Monosemantic Features

MonoTM is an interpretable topic modeling framework that separates the estimation of document–topic mixtures from the generation of topic descriptors. It uses sparse autoencoders to extract dense, interpretable features for mixture estimation, then learns topic descriptors from a distinct set of corpus‑grounded semantic features. This approach preserves global topic structure while providing more meaningful, semantic‑unit descriptors than traditional top‑word lists.

By Una Joh, Bei Yu
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.