HALE Lab NITK at Touché 2024: A Hybrid Approach for Identifying Political Ideology and Power in Multilingual Parliamentary Speeches

Abstract

In this article, an approach to determine the political views and stances of speakers for identifying whether they support or oppose the government in parliamentary discussions is presented. The work was carried out as part of the Touché 2024 Task 2, “Ideology and Power Identification in Parliamentary Debates†. Towards this, two systems were developed, the first employs traditional machine learning methods with TF-IDF embeddings, while the second utilizes advanced NLP techniques with the LASER encoder for multilingual embeddings. Both systems incorporate standard preprocessing techniques and also integrates a variety of models, after which a voting classifier is used to combine the predictions from both approaches. Experiments revealed that this comprehensive framework effectively addresses the complexities and nuances of political discourse, providing valuable insights into speakers' ideologies and governing statuses within parliamentary debates. © 2024 Copyright for this paper by its authors.