[2603.28103] Transcription and Recognition of Italian Parliamentary Speeches Using Vision-Language Models

Computer Science > Digital Libraries arXiv:2603.28103 (cs) [Submitted on 30 Mar 2026] Title:Transcription and Recognition of Italian Parliamentary Speeches Using Vision-Language Models Authors:Luigi Curini, Alfio Ferrara, Giovanni Pagano, Sergio Picascia View a PDF of the paper titled Transcription and Recognition of Italian Parliamentary Speeches Using Vision-Language Models, by Luigi Curini and 3 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Parliamentary proceedings represent a rich yet challenging resource for computational analysis, particularly when preserved only as scanned historical documents. Existing efforts to transcribe 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 substant...