Papers
arxiv:2608.20365

Trilingual Topic Modeling of Sri Lankan Parliamentary Debates

Published on Jun 18
Authors:
,
,
,
,
,
,
,

Abstract

A framework combining LLM-based extraction, multilingual embeddings, and density clustering enables unsupervised topic modeling across Sinhala, Tamil, and English parliamentary speeches.

Sri Lankan parliamentary debates (Hansards) constitute a trilingual corpus of speeches in Sinhala, Tamil, and English, including code-mixed content, yet remain inaccessible to standard NLP pipelines due to layout-complex PDFs, multilingual scripts, and agglutinative morphology. We present an end-to-end framework that addresses these challenges through LLM-based text extraction followed by a multilingual embedding and density-based clustering pipeline for topic modeling. A hybrid semantic-lexical extension, BiTopic, is further explored to improve interpretability and recover speeches otherwise discarded as noise. Applied to 19,553 speeches spanning 2017-2026, the pipeline recovers 30 macro-topics achieving a cluster purity (BCP) of 0.673, whose temporal trajectories align unsupervised with major national events including the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks and the 2022 economic crisis. Traditional LDA fails on this corpus due to cross-lingual fragmentation, whereas the proposed approach successfully identifies thematic structure across all three languages without supervision.

Community

Sign up or log in to comment

Get this paper in your agent:

hf papers read 2608.20365
Don't have the latest CLI?
curl -LsSf https://hf.co/cli/install.sh | bash

Models citing this paper 0

No model linking this paper

Cite arxiv.org/abs/2608.20365 in a model README.md to link it from this page.

Datasets citing this paper 0

No dataset linking this paper

Cite arxiv.org/abs/2608.20365 in a dataset README.md to link it from this page.

Spaces citing this paper 0

No Space linking this paper

Cite arxiv.org/abs/2608.20365 in a Space README.md to link it from this page.

Collections including this paper 0

No Collection including this paper

Add this paper to a collection to link it from this page.