An annotated dataset of literary entities

David Bamman, Sejal Popat, Sheng Shen


Abstract
We present a new dataset comprised of 210,532 tokens evenly drawn from 100 different English-language literary texts annotated for ACE entity categories (person, location, geo-political entity, facility, organization, and vehicle). These categories include non-named entities (such as “the boy”, “the kitchen”) and nested structure (such as [[the cook]’s sister]). In contrast to existing datasets built primarily on news (focused on geo-political entities and organizations), literary texts offer strikingly different distributions of entity categories, with much stronger emphasis on people and description of settings. We present empirical results demonstrating the performance of nested entity recognition models in this domain; training natively on in-domain literary data yields an improvement of over 20 absolute points in F-score (from 45.7 to 68.3), and mitigates a disparate impact in performance for male and female entities present in models trained on news data.
Anthology ID:
N19-1220
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:
2138–2144
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1220
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1220
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
David Bamman, Sejal Popat, and Sheng Shen. 2019. An annotated dataset of literary entities. 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 2138–2144, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
An annotated dataset of literary entities (Bamman et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1220.pdf
Video:
 https://vimeo.com/356050927
Code
 dbamman/litbank +  additional community code
Data
LitBank