"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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