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arXiv · 2109.05438

"Let Your Characters Tell Their Story": A Dataset for Character-Centric Narrative Understanding

Faeze Brahman·Meng Huang·Oyvind Tafjord·Chao Zhao·Mrinmaya Sachan·Snigdha Chaturvedi
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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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Faeze Brahman, Meng Huang, Oyvind Tafjord, Chao Zhao, Mrinmaya Sachan, Snigdha Chaturvedi. 2021-09-12. "Let Your Characters Tell Their Story": A Dataset for Character-Centric Narrative Understanding. https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.05438

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