Understanding Social Structures from Contemporary Literary Fiction using
  Character Interaction Graph -- Half Century Chronology of Influential Bengali
  Writers
Nafis Irtiza Tripto Mohammed Eunus Ali
Social structures and real-world incidents often influence contemporary
literary fiction. Existing research in literary fiction analysis explains these
real-world phenomena through the manual critical analysis of stories.
Conventional Natural Language Processing (NLP) methodologies, including
sentiment analysis, narrative summarization, and topic modeling, have
demonstrated substantial efficacy in analyzing and identifying similarities
within fictional works. However, the intricate dynamics of character
interactions within fiction necessitate a more nuanced approach that
incorporates visualization techniques. Character interaction graphs (or
networks) emerge as a highly suitable means for visualization and information
retrieval from the realm of fiction. Therefore, we leverage character
interaction graphs with NLP-derived features to explore a diverse spectrum of
societal inquiries about contemporary culture's impact on the landscape of
literary fiction. Our study involves constructing character interaction graphs
from fiction, extracting relevant graph features, and exploiting these features
to resolve various real-life queries. Experimental evaluation of influential
Bengali fiction over half a century demonstrates that character interaction
graphs can be highly effective in specific assessments and information
retrieval from literary fiction. Our data and codebase are available at
https://cutt.ly/fbMgGEM