Frowning Frodo, Wincing Leia, and a Seriously Great Friendship: Learning to Classify Emotional Relationships of Fictional Characters

Evgeny Kim, Roman Klinger


Abstract
The development of a fictional plot is centered around characters who closely interact with each other forming dynamic social networks. In literature analysis, such networks have mostly been analyzed without particular relation types or focusing on roles which the characters take with respect to each other. We argue that an important aspect for the analysis of stories and their development is the emotion between characters. In this paper, we combine these aspects into a unified framework to classify emotional relationships of fictional characters. We formalize it as a new task and describe the annotation of a corpus, based on fan-fiction short stories. The extraction pipeline which we propose consists of character identification (which we treat as given by an oracle here) and the relation classification. For the latter, we provide results using several approaches previously proposed for relation identification with neural methods. The best result of 0.45 F1 is achieved with a GRU with character position indicators on the task of predicting undirected emotion relations in the associated social network graph.
Anthology ID:
N19-1067
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
647–653
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1067
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1067
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Evgeny Kim and Roman Klinger. 2019. Frowning Frodo, Wincing Leia, and a Seriously Great Friendship: Learning to Classify Emotional Relationships of Fictional Characters. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 647–653, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Frowning Frodo, Wincing Leia, and a Seriously Great Friendship: Learning to Classify Emotional Relationships of Fictional Characters (Kim & Klinger, NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1067.pdf
Supplementary:
 N19-1067.Supplementary.pdf
Presentation:
 N19-1067.Presentation.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/N19-1067.mp4
Data
characterRelations