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Google Research Supported Effort to Annotate Character Relationships in Text (arxiv.org)
2 points by Katydid on Dec 8, 2015 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Crowd workers labeled how pairs of characters relate in 109 works, from the Iliad to Ulysses: the relationship type, whether it is friendly or hostile, and whether it changes. It gives programs a training and test set for mapping out who is who in stories.

Abstract · Annotating Character Relationships in Literary Texts

We present a dataset of manually annotated relationships between characters in literary texts, in order to support the training and evaluation of automatic methods for relation type prediction in this domain (Makazhanov et al., 2014; Kokkinakis, 2013) and the broader computational analysis of literary character (Elson et al., 2010; Bamman et al., 2014; Vala et al., 2015; Flekova and Gurevych, 2015). In this work, we solicit annotations from workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk for 109 texts ranging from Homer's _Iliad_ to Joyce's _Ulysses_ on four dimensions of interest: for a given pair of characters, we collect judgments as to the coarse-grained category (professional, social, familial), fine-grained category (friend, lover, parent, rival, employer), and affinity (positive, negative, neutral) that describes their primary relationship in a text. We do not assume that this relationship is static; we also collect judgments as to whether it changes at any point in the course of the text.

Philip Massey, Patrick Xia, David Bamman, Noah A. Smith
arXiv:1512.00728 · cs.CL · submitted Dec 2, 2015
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