Improving Quotation Attribution with Fictional Character Embeddings

Gaspard Michel, Elena V. Epure, Romain Hennequin, Christophe Cerisara


Abstract
Humans naturally attribute utterances of direct speech to their speaker in literary works.When attributing quotes, we process contextual information but also access mental representations of characters that we build and revise throughout the narrative. Recent methods to automatically attribute such utterances have explored simulating human logic with deterministic rules or learning new implicit rules with neural networks when processing contextual information.However, these systems inherently lack character representations, which often leads to errors in more challenging examples of attribution: anaphoric and implicit quotes.In this work, we propose to augment a popular quotation attribution system, BookNLP, with character embeddings that encode global stylistic information of characters derived from an off-the-shelf stylometric model, Universal Authorship Representation (UAR).We create DramaCV, a corpus of English drama plays from the 15th to 20th century that we automatically annotate for Authorship Verification of fictional characters utterances, and release two versions of UAR trained on DramaCV, that are tailored for literary characters analysis.Then, through an extensive evaluation on 28 novels, we show that combining BookNLP’s contextual information with our proposed global character embeddings improves the identification of speakers for anaphoric and implicit quotes, reaching state-of-the-art performance.Code and data can be found at https://github.com/deezer/character_embeddings_qa.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.744
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12723–12735
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.744
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.744
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Gaspard Michel, Elena V. Epure, Romain Hennequin, and Christophe Cerisara. 2024. Improving Quotation Attribution with Fictional Character Embeddings. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 12723–12735, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving Quotation Attribution with Fictional Character Embeddings (Michel et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.744.pdf
Software:
 2024.findings-emnlp.744.software.zip
Data:
 2024.findings-emnlp.744.data.zip