“Let Your Characters Tell Their Story”: A Dataset for Character-Centric Narrative Understanding
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Date
2021-11
Publication Type
Conference Paper
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yes
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Abstract
When reading a literary piece, readers often make inferences about various characters’ roles, personalities, relationships, intents, actions, etc. While humans can readily draw upon their past experiences to build such a character-centric view of the narrative, understanding characters in narratives can be a challenging task for machines. To encourage research in this field of character-centric narrative understanding, we present LiSCU – a new dataset of literary pieces and their summaries paired with descriptions of characters that appear in them. We also introduce two new tasks on LiSCU: Character Identification and Character Description Generation. Our experiments with several pre-trained language models adapted for these tasks demonstrate that there is a need for better models of narrative comprehension.
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published
Book title
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021
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Pages / Article No.
1734 - 1752
Publisher
Association for Computational Linguistics
Event
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2021)
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Software
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09684 - Sachan, Mrinmaya / Sachan, Mrinmaya