What does the sea say to the shore? A BERT based DST style approach for speaker to dialogue attribution in novels

Carolina Cuesta-Lazaro, Animesh Prasad, Trevor Wood


Abstract
We present a complete pipeline to extract characters in a novel and link them to their direct-speech utterances. Our model is divided into three independent components: extracting direct-speech, compiling a list of characters, and attributing those characters to their utterances. Although we find that existing systems can perform the first two tasks accurately, attributing characters to direct speech is a challenging problem due to the narrator’s lack of explicit character mentions, and the frequent use of nominal and pronominal coreference when such explicit mentions are made. We adapt the progress made on Dialogue State Tracking to tackle a new problem: attributing speakers to dialogues. This is the first application of deep learning to speaker attribution, and it shows that is possible to overcome the need for the hand-crafted features and rules used in the past. Our full pipeline improves the performance of state-of-the-art models by a relative 50% in F1-score.
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-long.400
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5820–5829
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.400
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.400
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Carolina Cuesta-Lazaro, Animesh Prasad, and Trevor Wood. 2022. What does the sea say to the shore? A BERT based DST style approach for speaker to dialogue attribution in novels. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5820–5829, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
What does the sea say to the shore? A BERT based DST style approach for speaker to dialogue attribution in novels (Cuesta-Lazaro et al., ACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.400.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.400.mp4