TiFi: Taxonomy Induction for Fictional Domains [Extended version]

Taxonomies are important building blocks of structured knowledge bases, and their construction from text sources and Wikipedia has received much attention. In this paper we focus on the construction of taxonomies for fictional domains, using noisy category systems from fan wikis or text extraction as input. Such fictional domains are archetypes of entity universes that are poorly covered by Wikipedia, such as also enterprise-specific knowledge bases or highly specialized verticals. Our fiction-targeted approach, called TiFi, consists of three phases: (i) category cleaning, by identifying candidate categories that truly represent classes in the domain of interest, (ii) edge cleaning, by selecting subcategory relationships that correspond to class subsumption, and (iii) top-level construction, by mapping classes onto a subset of high-level WordNet categories. A comprehensive evaluation shows that TiFi is able to construct taxonomies for a diverse range of fictional domains such as Lord of the Rings, The Simpsons or Greek Mythology with very high precision and that it outperforms state-of-the-art baselines for taxonomy induction by a substantial margin

Character Extraction and Character Type Identification from Summarised Story Plots

[EN] Identifying the characters from free-form text and understanding the roles and relationships between them is an evolving area of research. They have a wide range of applications, from summarising narrations to understanding the social network from social media tweets, which can help in automation and improve the experience of AI systems like chatbots and much more. The aim of this research is twofold. Firstly, we aim to develop an effective method of extracting characters from a story summary, to develop a set of relevant features, then, using supervised learning algorithms, to identify the character types. Secondly, we aim to examine the efficacy of unsupervised learning algorithms in type identification, as it is challenging to find a dataset with a predetermined list of characters, roles, and relationships that are essential for supervised learning. To do so, we used summary plots of fictional stories to experiment and evaluate our approach. Our character extraction approach successfully improved on the performance reported by existing work, with an average F1-score of 0.86. Supervised learning algorithms successfully identified the character types and achieved an overall average F1-score of 0.94. However, the clustering algorithms identified more than three clusters, indicating that more research is needed to improve their efficacy.Srinivasan, V.; Power, A. (2022). Character Extraction and Character Type Identification from Summarised Story Plots. Journal of Computer-Assisted Linguistic Research. 6:19-41. https://doi.org/10.4995/jclr.2022.178351941

Pattern recognition in narrative: Tracking emotional expression in context

Using geometric data analysis, our objective is the analysis of narrative, with narrative of emotion being the focus in this work. The following two principles for analysis of emotion inform our work. Firstly, emotion is revealed not as a quality in its own right but rather through interaction. We study the 2-way relationship of Ilsa and Rick in the movie Casablanca, and the 3-way relationship of Emma, Charles and Rodolphe in the novel {\em Madame Bovary}. Secondly, emotion, that is expression of states of mind of subjects, is formed and evolves within the narrative that expresses external events and (personal, social, physical) context. In addition to the analysis methodology with key aspects that are innovative, the input data used is crucial. We use, firstly, dialogue, and secondly, broad and general description that incorporates dialogue. In a follow-on study, we apply our unsupervised narrative mapping to data streams with very low emotional expression. We map the narrative of Twitter streams. Thus we demonstrate map analysis of general narratives