Research on Climactic Chapter Recognition of a Chinese Long Novel Based on Plot Description

Abstract

Many readers continue to pursue Chinese long novels in the past several decades because of diverse characters and fascinating plots. The climactic chapter is an important part of a Chinese long novel, where the key conflict develops to the extreme point. However, how to quickly and accurately recognize the climactic chapter remains a common problem for many readers in their reading choices. This paper conducts research on recognizing the climactic chapter of a Chinese long novel by accurately describing its plot. The proposed method consists of two parts; one is the extraction of key elements, such as viewpoint paragraphs, non-viewpoint paragraphs, chapter keywords, major characters etc. The other part is the climactic chapter recognition, which applies the Bidirectional Gate Recurrent Unit (BiGRU) model and the multi-head attention to recognize the climactic chapter, on the basis of the chapter plot description matrix. Comparative experiments on the corpus named The Condor Trilogy show that the proposed method in this paper has a better recognition performance compared with the existing models, such as Naive Bayesian (NB), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Roberta-large, and the Bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory (BiLSTM) network. Ablation experiments validated the effectiveness of primary components in the proposed method.