Identifying Speakers and Addressees in Dialogues Extracted from Literary Fiction

Identifying Speakers and Addressees in Dialogues Extracted from Literary Fiction Adam Ek, Mats Wirén, Robert Östling, Kristina N. Björkenstam, Gintar˙e Grigonyt˙e & Sofia Gustafson Capková Department of Linguistics Stockholm University SE-106 91 Stockholm {adam.ek, mats.wiren, robert, kristina.nilsson, gintare, sofia}@ling.su.se Abstract This paper describes an approach to identifying speakers and addressees in dialogues extracted from literary fiction, along with a dataset annotated for speaker and addressee. The overall purpose of this is to provide annotation of dialogue interaction between characters in literary corpora in order to allow for enriched search facilities and construction of social networks from the corpora. To predict speakers and addressees in a dialogue, we use a sequence labeling approach applied to a given set of characters. We use features relating to the current dialogue, the preceding narrative, and the complete preceding context. The results indicate that even with a small amount of training data, it is possible to build a fairly accurate classifier for speaker and addressee identification across different authors, though the identification of addressees is the more difficult task. Keywords: literary corpora, speaker identification, addressee identification, quote attribution 1. Introduction During the last few years, quantitative approaches to lit- erary analysis have increasingly progressed from stylistic problems to higher-level phenomena such as plot, commu- nity structure and interaction between protagonists. One example of this is the recent interest in constructing social networks from literary fiction, either manually (Moretti, 2011; Agarwal et al., 2012; Yeung and Lee, 2016; Vala et al., 2016) or using automatic methods (Newman and Gir- van, 2004; Elson et al., 2010; Rydberg-Cox, 2011). Typ- ically, the goal has been to mirror relations between enti- ties or events extracted from the text as a whole. Arguably, however, a more fine-grained perspective can be obtained by studying the direct speech between characters separately from the narratives in which the speech is embedded. Di- rect speech, in literary fiction usually framed by devices such as dashes, quotation marks and paragraphs, can be seen as the lowest level of narrative transmission (Koivisto and Nykänen, 2016). In this sense, it provides an inde- pendent level in which the relations between characters can be studied, including phenomena such as stance and senti- ment as expressed through (the rendering of) the characters themselves. To properly analyse dialogue interactions, we need to iden- tify both the speakers and the addressees in occurrences of direct speech. The former problem, also known as quote attribution, has been explored in literary fiction by, among others, Elson et al. (2010), O’Keefe et al. (2012), He et al. (2013) and Muzny et al. (2017). As far as we know, how- ever, the problem of identifying addressees (liistenerns) in literary fiction has previously only been dealt with by Ye- ung and Lee (2017). For the purpose of specifying our method, we make the following assumptions, aimed at covering differing author styles. We refer to a sequence of direct speech interactions as a dialogue; this consists of one or more turns, each of which we assume is …

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