TRACE is a training‑free, agentic retrieval framework that enables accountable source discovery in historical archives, addressing challenges such as OCR degradation and genre heterogeneity. Developed for the DECIDON project on French Third Republic political discourse, it is deployed internally for 24 researchers across six institutions. On the HistoriQA‑ThirdRepublic benchmark, TRACE achieves R@10 of 0.856 and MRR of 0.653, outperforming sparse, dense, graph‑based, and other agentic RAG baselines, especially on multi‑hop and cross‑corpus questions, while costing only about $0.02 per question.
By Donghan Bian (ENC, LRE), Marie Puren (LRE, ENC), Florian Cafiero (LRE, ENC)
arXiv:2606. 31325v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present HistoriQA-ThirdRepublic: a French-language dataset of multi-hop historical questions derived from parliamentary debates and newspapers of the French Third Republic.
By Aur\'elien Pellet (LRE), Julien Perez (EPITA, LRE), Marie Puren (LRE, CJM)
arXiv:2511. 17813v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-based simulations can enable controlled studies of civic deliberation, but current systems lack speaker-attributed data and methods for evaluating long-form institutional behavior.
By Scott Merrill, Shashank Srivastava
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
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
As users increasingly turn to Large Language Models (LLMs) for information and advice on political matters, particularly during election periods, the political preferences expressed by these systems have become a matter of public interest. Prior research has shown that interactions with LLMs can influence users' political attitudes and choices, raising questions about how these models themselves evaluate political actors.