Current models for quotation attribution in literary novels assume varying levels of available information in their training and test data, which poses a challenge for in-the-wild inference. Here, we approach quotation attribution as a set of four interconnected sub-tasks: character identification, coreference resolution, quotation identification, and speaker attribution. We benchmark state-of-the-art models on each of these sub-tasks independently, using a large dataset of annotated coreferences and quotations in literary novels (the Project Dialogism Novel Corpus). We also train and evaluate models for the speaker attribution task in particular, showing that a simple sequential prediction model achieves accuracy scores on par with state-of-the-art models.
@article{arxiv.2307.03734,
title = {Improving Automatic Quotation Attribution in Literary Novels},
author = {Krishnapriya Vishnubhotla and Frank Rudzicz and Graeme Hirst and Adam Hammond},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.03734},
year = {2023}
}