Abstract
One of the most fundamental elements of narrative is character: if we are to understand a narrative, we must be able to identify the characters of that narrative. Therefore, character identification is a critical task in narrative natural language understanding. Most prior work has lacked a narratologically grounded definition of character, instead relying on simplified or implicit definitions that do not capture essential distinctions between characters and other referents in narratives. In prior work we proposed a preliminary definition of character that was based in clear narratological principles: a character is an animate entity that is important to the plot. Here we flesh out this concept, demonstrate that it can be reliably annotated (0.78 Cohen’s κ), and provide annotations of 170 narrative texts, drawn from 3 different corpora, containing 1,347 character co-reference chains and 21,999 non-character chains that include 3,937 animate chains. Furthermore, we have shown that a supervised classifier using a simple set of easily computable features can effectively identify these characters (overall F1 of 0.90). A detailed error analysis shows that character identification is first and foremost affected by co-reference quality, and further, that the shorter a chain is the harder it is to effectively identify as a character. We release our code and data for the benefit of other researchers
Highlights
Characters are some of the most central elements of narratives, and the concept of character plays an important role in most definitions of narrative
We have discussed prior work briefly in the introduction, we summarize work related to this study (§7) before we conclude by enumerating our contributions (§8)
The extended ProppLearner We performed some preprocessing on this corpus, primarily involved in correcting minor errors in the coreference chain annotation
Summary
Characters are some of the most central elements of narratives, and the concept of character plays an important role in most definitions of narrative. ” (Fludernik, 2009, p.6; emphasis ours) This definition clearly states that characters are central to stories per se. It is natural to assume that character identification is an important step in automatic approaches to story understanding. Regardless of approach, all prior work of which we are aware has, had a relatively impoverished concept of character, at least from a narratological point of view. We first define and operationalize our concept of character, and use that concept to generate annotated data (170 narrative texts drawn from 3 different corpora) with high inter-annotator agreement. We discuss the definition of the character as presented by narratologists, contrasting this concept with those used in prior computational work, and describe an operationalized concept of character that can be annotated with high inter-annotator agreement (§2). We have discussed prior work briefly in the introduction, we summarize work related to this study (§7) before we conclude by enumerating our contributions (§8)
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