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Title: Character Identification Refined: A Proposal
Characters are a key element of narrative and so character identification plays an important role in automatic narrative understanding. Unfortunately, most prior work that incorporates character identification is not built upon a clear, theoretically grounded concept of character. They either take character identification for granted (e.g., using simple heuristics on referring expressions), or rely on simplified definitions that do not capture important distinctions between characters and other referents in the story. Prior approaches have also been rather complicated, relying, for example, on predefined case bases or ontologies. In this paper we propose a narratologically grounded definition of character for discussion at the workshop, and also demonstrate a preliminary yet straightforward supervised machine learning model with a small set of features that performs well on two corpora. The most important of the two corpora is a set of 46 Russian folktales, on which the model achieves an F1 of 0.81. Error analysis suggests that features relevant to the plot will be necessary for further improvements in performance.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1749917
NSF-PAR ID:
10140302
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Narrative Understanding
Page Range / eLocation ID:
12 - 18
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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