Grounding Characters and Places in Narrative Texts

Sandeep Soni

Abstract:

Tracking characters and locations throughout a
story can help improve the understanding of its
plot structure. Prior research has analyzed characters and locations from text independently
without grounding characters to their locations
in narrative time. Here, we address this gap
by proposing a new spatial relationship categorization task. The objective of the task is
to assign a spatial relationship category for every character and location co-mention within a
window of text, taking into consideration linguistic context, narrative tense, and temporal
scope. To this end, we annotate spatial relationships in approximately 2500 book excerpts and
train a model using contextual embeddings as
features to predict these relationships. When
applied to a set of books, this model allows
us to test several hypotheses on mobility and
domestic space, revealing that protagonists are
more mobile than non-central characters and
that women as characters tend to occupy more
interior space than men. Overall, our work is
the first step towards joint modeling and analysis of characters and places in narrative text.