"Let Your Characters Tell Their Story": A Dataset for Character-Centric Narrative Understanding
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.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2109.05438,
title = {"Let Your Characters Tell Their Story": A Dataset for Character-Centric Narrative Understanding},
author = {Faeze Brahman and Meng Huang and Oyvind Tafjord and Chao Zhao and Mrinmaya Sachan and Snigdha Chaturvedi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.05438},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
Accepted to Findings of EMNLP 2021