Personality Understanding of Fictional Characters during Book Reading

Mo Yu, Jiangnan Li, Shunyu Yao, Wenjie Pang, Xiaochen Zhou, Zhou Xiao, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou


Abstract
Comprehending characters’ personalities is a crucial aspect of story reading. As readers engage with a story, their understanding of a character evolves based on new events and information; and multiple fine-grained aspects of personalities can be perceived. This leads to a natural problem of situated and fine-grained personality understanding. The problem has not been studied in the NLP field, primarily due to the lack of appropriate datasets mimicking the process of book reading. We present the first labeled dataset PersoNet for this problem. Our novel annotation strategy involves annotating user notes from online reading apps as a proxy for the original books. Experiments and human studies indicate that our dataset construction is both efficient and accurate; and our task heavily relies on long-term context to achieve accurate predictions for both machines and humans.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.826
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14784–14802
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.826
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.826
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mo Yu, Jiangnan Li, Shunyu Yao, Wenjie Pang, Xiaochen Zhou, Zhou Xiao, Fandong Meng, and Jie Zhou. 2023. Personality Understanding of Fictional Characters during Book Reading. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 14784–14802, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Personality Understanding of Fictional Characters during Book Reading (Yu et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.826.pdf