Grounding Characters and Places in Narrative Texts
Sandeep Soni Amanpreet Sihra Elizabeth F. Evans Matthew Wilkens David Bamman
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.