Grounding Characters and Places in Narrative Text

Sandeep Soni, Amanpreet Sihra, Elizabeth F. Evans, Matthew Wilkens, David Bamman

Main: Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics Main-oral Paper

Session 3: Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics (Oral)
Conference Room: Pier 2&3
Conference Time: July 11, 09:00-10:15 (EDT) (America/Toronto)
Global Time: July 11, Session 3 (13:00-14:15 UTC)
Keywords: nlp tools for social analysis
TLDR: 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 ...
You can open the #paper-P4188 channel in a separate window.
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.