From News Streams to Narrative Intelligence Briefs: LLM-Assisted Political Discourse Analysis in the Hungarian 2026 Pre-Election Context

Ekaterina Loginova, Maksim Ermakov, Stephan Khramov


Abstract
Civil-society organisations, journalists, and fact-checkers monitoring elections require scalable ways to convert high-volume political news into actionable narrative intelligence, yet most NLP pipelines stop at classification outputs that are difficult to operationalise. We present a methodology-driven case study assessing whether large language models, constrained by an explicit analytical schema and multi-stage validation, can reliably transform Hungarian pre-election news into structured narrative intelligence briefs. Using RSS-scraped content from 21 Hungarian-language sources (574 election-relevant articles), we implement a multi-stage pipeline: (1) per-article extraction of narrative event frames grounded in the Narrative Policy Framework (actor–action–target with role assignment and causal claims) and manipulation techniques from the SemEval propaganda taxonomy; (2) embedding-based clustering of narrative frames with domain classification; and (3) constrained brief generation producing five structured sections—narrative summary, character map, manipulation profile, escalation assessment, and counter-strategy—where counter-strategies are grounded in verified external sources via curated contextual cards and constrained by evidence-based de-escalation principles. We evaluate brief quality through dual-track evaluation combining three human domain experts and three LLM judges on a single brief, with a scaled 29-brief LLM-as-judge assessment, and document key failure modes across a defined taxonomy. We conclude with implications for trustworthy human-in-the-loop political NLP and the practical limits of LLM-assisted narrative intelligence.
Anthology ID:
2026.politicalnlp-1.1
Volume:
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Political Sciences (PoliticalNLP 2026)
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Haithem Afli, Houda Bouamor, Wajdi Zaghouani, Sahar Ghannay, Shehenaz Hossain
Venues:
PoliticalNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
1–16
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-politicalnlp-01
DOI:
10.63317/228tnds8d6kd
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ekaterina Loginova, Maksim Ermakov, and Stephan Khramov. 2026. From News Streams to Narrative Intelligence Briefs: LLM-Assisted Political Discourse Analysis in the Hungarian 2026 Pre-Election Context. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Political Sciences (PoliticalNLP 2026), pages 1–16, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
From News Streams to Narrative Intelligence Briefs: LLM-Assisted Political Discourse Analysis in the Hungarian 2026 Pre-Election Context (Loginova et al., PoliticalNLP 2026)
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