Narrative Shift Detection: A Hybrid Approach of Dynamic Topic Models and Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lange, Kai-Robin, Schmidt, Tobias, Reccius, Matthias, Müller, Henrik, Roos, Michael, Jentsch, Carsten
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Lange, Kai-Robin
Schmidt, Tobias
Reccius, Matthias
Müller, Henrik
Roos, Michael
Jentsch, Carsten
author_facet Lange, Kai-Robin
Schmidt, Tobias
Reccius, Matthias
Müller, Henrik
Roos, Michael
Jentsch, Carsten
contents With rapidly evolving media narratives, it has become increasingly critical to not just extract narratives from a given corpus but rather investigate, how they develop over time. While popular narrative extraction methods such as Large Language Models do well in capturing typical narrative elements or even the complex structure of a narrative, applying them to an entire corpus comes with obstacles, such as a high financial or computational cost. We propose a combination of the language understanding capabilities of Large Language Models with the large scale applicability of topic models to dynamically model narrative shifts across time using the Narrative Policy Framework. We apply a topic model and a corresponding change point detection method to find changes that concern a specific topic of interest. Using this model, we filter our corpus for documents that are particularly representative of that change and feed them into a Large Language Model that interprets the change that happened in an automated fashion and distinguishes between content and narrative shifts. We employ our pipeline on a corpus of The Wall Street Journal news paper articles from 2009 to 2023. Our findings indicate that a Large Language Model can efficiently extract a narrative shift if one exists at a given point in time, but does not perform as well when having to decide whether a shift in content or a narrative shift took place.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_20269
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Narrative Shift Detection: A Hybrid Approach of Dynamic Topic Models and Large Language Models
Lange, Kai-Robin
Schmidt, Tobias
Reccius, Matthias
Müller, Henrik
Roos, Michael
Jentsch, Carsten
Computation and Language
General Economics
Economics
With rapidly evolving media narratives, it has become increasingly critical to not just extract narratives from a given corpus but rather investigate, how they develop over time. While popular narrative extraction methods such as Large Language Models do well in capturing typical narrative elements or even the complex structure of a narrative, applying them to an entire corpus comes with obstacles, such as a high financial or computational cost. We propose a combination of the language understanding capabilities of Large Language Models with the large scale applicability of topic models to dynamically model narrative shifts across time using the Narrative Policy Framework. We apply a topic model and a corresponding change point detection method to find changes that concern a specific topic of interest. Using this model, we filter our corpus for documents that are particularly representative of that change and feed them into a Large Language Model that interprets the change that happened in an automated fashion and distinguishes between content and narrative shifts. We employ our pipeline on a corpus of The Wall Street Journal news paper articles from 2009 to 2023. Our findings indicate that a Large Language Model can efficiently extract a narrative shift if one exists at a given point in time, but does not perform as well when having to decide whether a shift in content or a narrative shift took place.
title Narrative Shift Detection: A Hybrid Approach of Dynamic Topic Models and Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
General Economics
Economics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20269