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.
Sememes are defined as the atomic units to describe the semantic meaning of concepts. Due to the difficulty of manually annotating sememes and the inconsistency of annotations between experts, the lexical sememe prediction task has been proposed. How
ever, previous methods heavily rely on word or character embeddings, and ignore the fine-grained information. In this paper, we propose a novel pre-training method which is designed to better incorporate the internal information of Chinese character. The Glyph enhanced Chinese Character representation (GCC) is used to assist sememe prediction. We experiment and evaluate our model on HowNet, which is a famous sememe knowledge base. The experimental results show that our method outperforms existing non-external information models.
This paper introduces a long-range multiple-choice Question Answering (QA) dataset, based on full-length fiction book texts. The questions are formulated as 10-way multiple-choice questions, where the task is to select the correct character name give
n a character description, or vice-versa. Each character description is formulated in natural text and often contains information from several sections throughout the book. We provide 20,000 questions created from 10,000 manually annotated descriptions of characters from 177 books containing 152,917 words on average. We address the current discourse regarding dataset bias and leakage by a simple anonymization procedure, which in turn enables interesting probing possibilities. Finally, we show that suitable baseline algorithms perform very poorly on this task, with the book size itself making it non-trivial to attempt a Transformer-based QA solution. This leaves ample room for future improvement, and hints at the need for a completely different type of solution.
Existing text-based personality detection research mostly relies on data-driven approaches to implicitly capture personality cues in online posts, lacking the guidance of psychological knowledge. Psychological questionnaire, which contains a series o
f dedicated questions highly related to personality traits, plays a critical role in self-report personality assessment. We argue that the posts created by a user contain critical contents that could help answer the questions in a questionnaire, resulting in an assessment of his personality by linking the texts and the questionnaire. To this end, we propose a new model named Psychological Questionnaire enhanced Network (PQ-Net) to guide personality detection by tracking critical information in texts with a questionnaire. Specifically, PQ-Net contains two streams: a context stream to encode each piece of text into a contextual text representation, and a questionnaire stream to capture relevant information in the contextual text representation to generate potential answer representations for a questionnaire. The potential answer representations are used to enhance the contextual text representation and to benefit personality prediction. Experimental results on two datasets demonstrate the superiority of PQ-Net in capturing useful cues from the posts for personality detection.
Stereotypical character roles-also known as archetypes or dramatis personae-play an important function in narratives: they facilitate efficient communication with bundles of default characteristics and associations and ease understanding of those cha
racters' roles in the overall narrative. We present a fully unsupervised k-means clustering approach for learning stereotypical roles given only structural plot information. We demonstrate the technique on Vladimir Propp's structural theory of Russian folktales (captured in the extended ProppLearner corpus, with 46 tales), showing that our approach can induce six out of seven of Propp's dramatis personae with F1 measures of up to 0.70 (0.58 average), with an additional category for minor characters. We have explored various feature sets and variations of a cluster evaluation method. The best-performing feature set comprises plot functions, unigrams, tf-idf weights, and embeddings over coreference chain heads. Roles that are mentioned more often (Hero, Villain), or have clearly distinct plot patterns (Princess) are more strongly differentiated than less frequent or distinct roles (Dispatcher, Helper, Donor). Detailed error analysis suggests that the quality of the coreference chain and plot functions annotations are critical for this task. We provide all our data and code for reproducibility.
While the field of style transfer (ST) has been growing rapidly, it has been hampered by a lack of standardized practices for automatic evaluation. In this paper, we evaluate leading automatic metrics on the oft-researched task of formality style tra
nsfer. Unlike previous evaluations, which focus solely on English, we expand our focus to Brazilian-Portuguese, French, and Italian, making this work the first multilingual evaluation of metrics in ST. We outline best practices for automatic evaluation in (formality) style transfer and identify several models that correlate well with human judgments and are robust across languages. We hope that this work will help accelerate development in ST, where human evaluation is often challenging to collect.
Character-aware neural language models can capture the relationship between words by exploiting character-level information and are particularly effective for languages with rich morphology. However, these models are usually biased towards informatio
n from surface forms. To alleviate this problem, we propose a simple and effective method to improve a character-aware neural language model by forcing a character encoder to produce word-based embeddings under Skip-gram architecture in a warm-up step without extra training data. We empirically show that the resulting character-aware neural language model achieves obvious improvements of perplexity scores on typologically diverse languages, that contain many low-frequency or unseen words.
Language technologies, such as machine translation (MT), but also the application of artificial intelligence in general and an abundance of CAT tools and platforms have an increasing influence on the translation market. Human interaction with these t
echnologies becomes ever more important as they impact translators' workflows, work environments, and job profiles. Moreover, it has implications for translator training. One of the tasks that emerged with language technologies is post-editing (PE) where a human translator corrects raw machine translated output according to given guidelines and quality criteria (O'Brien, 2011: 197-198). Already widely used in several traditional translation settings, its use has come into focus in more creative processes such as literary translation and audiovisual translation (AVT) as well. With the integration of MT systems, the translation process should become more efficient. Both economic and cognitive processes are impacted and with it the necessary competences of all stakeholders involved change. In this paper, we want to describe the different potential job profiles and respective competences needed when post-editing subtitles.
This paper explores character-driven story continuation, in which the story emerges through characters' first- and second-person narration as well as dialogue---requiring models to select language that is consistent with a character's persona and the
ir relationships with other characters while following and advancing the story. We hypothesize that a multi-task model that trains on character dialogue plus character relationship information improves transformer-based story continuation. To this end, we extend the Critical Role Dungeons and Dragons Dataset (Rameshkumar and Bailey, 2020)---consisting of dialogue transcripts of people collaboratively telling a story while playing the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons---with automatically extracted relationships between each pair of interacting characters as well as their personas. A series of ablations lend evidence to our hypothesis, showing that our multi-task model using character relationships improves story continuation accuracy over strong baselines.
To maintain utterance quality of a persona-aware dialog system, inappropriate utterances for the persona should be thoroughly filtered. When evaluating the appropriateness of a large number of arbitrary utterances to be registered in the utterance da
tabase of a retrieval-based dialog system, evaluation metrics that require a reference (or a correct'' utterance) for each evaluation target cannot be used. In addition, practical utterance filtering requires the ability to select utterances based on the intensity of persona characteristics. Therefore, we are developing metrics that can be used to capture the intensity of persona characteristics and can be computed without references tailored to the evaluation targets. To this end, we explore existing metrics and propose two new metrics: persona speaker probability and persona term salience. Experimental results show that our proposed metrics show weak to moderate correlations between scores of persona characteristics based on human judgments and outperform other metrics overall in filtering inappropriate utterances for particular personas.
