Identifying Speakers and Addressees in Dialogues Extracted from Literary Fiction

Adam Ek, Mats Wirén, Robert Östling, Kristina Nilsson Björkenstam, Gintare Grigonyte, Sofia Gustafson-Capková

Abstract: This paper describes an approach to identifying speakers and addressees in dialogues extracted from literary fiction, along with a dataset annotated for speaker and addressee. The overall purpose of this is to provide annotation of dialogue interaction between characters in literary corpora in order to allow for enriched search facilities and construction of social networks from the corpora. To predict speakers and addressees in a dialogue, we use a sequence labeling approach applied to a given set of characters. We use features relating to the current dialogue, the preceding narrative, and the complete preceding context. The results indicate that even with a small amount of training data, it is possible to build a fairly accurate classifier for speaker and addressee identification across different authors, though the identification of addressees is the more difficult task.