Detecting Scenes in Fiction: A new Segmentation Task

Albin Zehe, Leonard Konle, Lea Katharina Dümpelmann, Evelyn Gius, Andreas Hotho, Fotis Jannidis, Lucas Kaufmann, Markus Krug, Frank Puppe, Nils Reiter, Annekea Schreiber, Nathalie Wiedmer


Abstract
This paper introduces the novel task of scene segmentation on narrative texts and provides an annotated corpus, a discussion of the linguistic and narrative properties of the task and baseline experiments towards automatic solutions. A scene here is a segment of the text where time and discourse time are more or less equal, the narration focuses on one action and location and character constellations stay the same. The corpus we describe consists of German-language dime novels (550k tokens) that have been annotated in parallel, achieving an inter-annotator agreement of gamma = 0.7. Baseline experiments using BERT achieve an F1 score of 24%, showing that the task is very challenging. An automatic scene segmentation paves the way towards processing longer narrative texts like tales or novels by breaking them down into smaller, coherent and meaningful parts, which is an important stepping stone towards the reconstruction of plot in Computational Literary Studies but also can serve to improve tasks like coreference resolution.
Anthology ID:
2021.eacl-main.276
Volume:
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume
Month:
April
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Paola Merlo, Jorg Tiedemann, Reut Tsarfaty
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3167–3177
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.276
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-main.276
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Albin Zehe, Leonard Konle, Lea Katharina Dümpelmann, Evelyn Gius, Andreas Hotho, Fotis Jannidis, Lucas Kaufmann, Markus Krug, Frank Puppe, Nils Reiter, Annekea Schreiber, and Nathalie Wiedmer. 2021. Detecting Scenes in Fiction: A new Segmentation Task. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume, pages 3167–3177, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Detecting Scenes in Fiction: A new Segmentation Task (Zehe et al., EACL 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.276.pdf