"Let Your Characters Tell Their Story": A Dataset for Character-Centric
Narrative Understanding
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2109.05438v1
- Date: Sun, 12 Sep 2021 06:12:55 GMT
- Title: "Let Your Characters Tell Their Story": A Dataset for Character-Centric
Narrative Understanding
- Authors: Faeze Brahman, Meng Huang, Oyvind Tafjord, Chao Zhao, Mrinmaya Sachan
and Snigdha Chaturvedi
- Abstract summary: 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.
- Score: 31.803481510886378
- License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
- 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.
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