cd /news/natural-language-processing/trilingual-topic-modeling-of-sri-lan… · home topics natural-language-processing article
[ARTICLE · art-108256] src=arxiv.org ↗ pub= topic=natural-language-processing verified=true sentiment=· neutral

Trilingual Topic Modeling of Sri Lankan Parliamentary Debates

A new arXiv paper (2608.20365v1) presents an end-to-end framework using LLM-based text extraction and multilingual embedding with density-based clustering to topic-model 19,553 trilingual Sri Lankan parliamentary speeches from 2017-2026, recovering 30 macro-topics with a cluster purity of 0.673 and aligning with major national events such as the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks and the 2022 economic crisis. The authors propose a hybrid semantic-lexical extension called BiTopic to improve interpretability and recover discarded speeches, while noting that traditional LDA fails due to cross-lingual fragmentation.

read1 min views1 publishedAug 24, 2026

arXiv:2608.20365v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 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.

── more in #natural-language-processing 4 stories · sorted by recency
── more on @arxiv 3 stories trending now
sponsored brought to you by zahid.host 4,200+ EU-deployed projects
reading about agents? ship yours in a single git push.

Run your AI side-project on zahid.host

EU-based hosting, git-push deploys, automatic HTTPS, no cold starts. Free tier with a custom domain — perfect for shipping the agent you just read about.

$git push zahid main
Live at https://your-agent.zahid.host
Get free account → Pricing
from €0/mo · no card required
LIVE [news/trilingual-topic-mod…] indexed:0 read:1min 2026-08-24 ·