A Straightforward Approach to Narratologically Grounded Character Identification

Mark Finlayson

Abstract:

One of the most fundamental elements of narrative is character: if we are to understand a nar-
rative, we must be able to identify the characters of that narrative. Therefore, character iden-
tification 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 im-
plicit 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 fur-
ther, 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