Unravelling Names of Fictional Characters

Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 2154–2163, Berlin, Germany, August 7-12, 2016. c⃝2016 Association for Computational Linguistics Unravelling Names of Fictional Characters Katerina Papantoniou Institute of Computer Science, FORTH Heraklion, Greece papanton@ics.forth.gr Stasinos Konstantopoulos Institute of Informatics & Telecommunications, NCSR ‘Demokritos’ Ag. Paraskevi 153 10, Athens, Greece konstant@iit.demokritos.gr Abstract In this paper we explore the correlation be- tween the sound of words and their mean- ing, by testing if the polarity (‘good guy’ or ‘bad guy’) of a character’s role in a work of fiction can be predicted by the name of the character in the absence of any other context. Our approach is based on phonological and other features pro- posed in prior theoretical studies of fic- tional names. These features are used to construct a predictive model over a man- ually annotated corpus of characters from motion pictures. By experimenting with different mixtures of features, we identify phonological features as being the most discriminative by comparison to social and other types of features, and we delve into a discussion of specific phonological and phonotactic indicators of a character’s role’s polarity. 1 Introduction Could it be possible for fictional characters’ names such as ‘Dr. No’ and ‘Hannibal Lecter’ to be at- tributed to positive characters whereas names such as ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Mary Poppins’ to negative ones? Could someone guess who is the hero and who is the competitor based only on the name of the character and what would be the factors that contribute to such intuition? Literary theory sug- gests that it should be possible, because fictional character names function as expressions of expe- rience, ethos, teleology, values, culture, ideology, and attitudes of the character. However, work in literary theory, psychology, linguistics and philosophy has studied fictional names by analysing individual works or small clusters of closely related works, such as those of a particular author. By contrast, we apply tools from computational linguistics at a larger scale aiming to identify more general patterns that are not tied to any specific creator’s idiosyncrasies and prefer- ences; in the hope that extracting such patterns can provide valuable insights about how the sound of names and, more generally, words correlates with their meaning. At the core of our approach is the idea that the names of fictional characters follow (possi- bly subconsciously) a perception of what a posi- tive or a negative name ought to sound like that is shared between the creator and the audience. Nat- urally the personal preferences or experiences of the creator might add noise, but fictional charac- ters’ names will at least not suffer (or suffer less) from the systematic cultural bias bound to exist in real persons’ names. In the remainder of this paper, we first present the relevant background, including both theoreti- cal work and computational work relevant to peo- ples’ names (Section 2). Based on this theoretical work, we then proceed to formulate a set of fea- tures that can be computationally extracted from …

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