Transcription and Recognition of Italian Parliamentary Speeches Using Vision-Language Models

Luigi Curini, Alfio Ferrara, Giovanni Pagano, Sergio Picascia


Abstract
Parliamentary proceedings represent a rich yet challenging resource for computational analysis, particularly when preserved only as scanned historical documents. Existing efforts to digitise Italian parliamentary speeches have relied on traditional Optical Character Recognition pipelines, resulting in transcription errors and limited semantic annotation. In this paper, we propose a pipeline based on Vision-Language Models for the automatic transcription, semantic segmentation, and entity linking of Italian parliamentary speeches. The pipeline employs a specialised OCR model to extract text while preserving reading order, followed by a large-scale Vision-Language Model that performs transcription refinement, element classification, and speaker identification by jointly reasoning over visual layout and textual content. Extracted speakers are then linked to the Chamber of Deputies knowledge base through SPARQL queries and a multi-strategy fuzzy matching procedure. Evaluation against an established benchmark demonstrates substantial improvements both in transcription quality and speaker tagging.
Anthology ID:
2026.parlaclarin-1.7
Volume:
Proceedings of the ParlaCLARIN V Workshop on Interoperability, Multilinguality, and Multimodality in Parliamentary Corpora
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Maria Eskevich, Vincent Vandeghinste, David Bodron
Venues:
ParlaCLARIN | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
56–64
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-parlaclarin-07
DOI:
10.63317/587myq3zu4y2
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Luigi Curini, Alfio Ferrara, Giovanni Pagano, and Sergio Picascia. 2026. Transcription and Recognition of Italian Parliamentary Speeches Using Vision-Language Models. In Proceedings of the ParlaCLARIN V Workshop on Interoperability, Multilinguality, and Multimodality in Parliamentary Corpora, pages 56–64, Palma de Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Transcription and Recognition of Italian Parliamentary Speeches Using Vision-Language Models (Curini et al., ParlaCLARIN 2026)
Copy Citation: