Ecological Discourse Modeling in a Low-Resource Setting: A Longitudinal Vietnamese Climate Corpus with Comparative Topic Modeling

Huyen Phuong Nguyen


Abstract
Climate change discourse has expanded substantially in recent decades, yet computational analyses remain concentrated on high-resource languages. In this paper, we construct a longitudinal Vietnamese climate news corpus and examine thematic structure and temporal evolution in a lower-resource setting. The corpus comprises 10,401 articles published between 2004 and 2026 and is systematically preprocessed using linguistically informed word segmentation. To ensure domestic relevance, we apply transformer-based Named Entity Recognition and construct a geographically grounded subset of 4,501 Vietnam-focused documents. We analyze this dataset using both Latent Dirichlet Allocation and BERTopic. Results reveal stable thematic dimensions alongside longitudinal shifts from event-driven pollution reporting toward governance- and energy-centered narratives. Embedding-based modeling achieves higher semantic coherence while maintaining comparable topic diversity. The main contribution of this work is thus the compilation of a structured Vietnamese climate corpus and a systematic analysis of discourse evolution in an underrepresented language context.
Anthology ID:
2026.nlp4ecology-1.7
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Ecology, Environment, and Natural Language Processing
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Francesca Grasso, Valerio Basile, Cristina Bosco, Muhammad Okky Ibrohim, Maria Skeppstedt, Manfred Stede
Venues:
NLP4Ecology | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
69–78
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-nlp4ecology-07
DOI:
10.63317/4n8q3zryqvju
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Huyen Phuong Nguyen. 2026. Ecological Discourse Modeling in a Low-Resource Setting: A Longitudinal Vietnamese Climate Corpus with Comparative Topic Modeling. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Ecology, Environment, and Natural Language Processing, pages 69–78, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Ecological Discourse Modeling in a Low-Resource Setting: A Longitudinal Vietnamese Climate Corpus with Comparative Topic Modeling (Nguyen, NLP4Ecology 2026)
Copy Citation: