Symbolization, Prompt, and Classification: A Framework for Implicit Speaker Identification in Novels

Yue Chen, Tianwei He, Hongbin Zhou, Jia-Chen Gu, Heng Lu, Zhen-Hua Ling


Abstract
Speaker identification in novel dialogues can be widely applied to various downstream tasks, such as producing multi-speaker audiobooks and converting novels into scripts. However, existing state-of-the-art methods are limited to handling explicit narrative patterns like “Tom said, '...'", unable to thoroughly understand long-range contexts and to deal with complex cases. To this end, we propose a framework named SPC, which identifies implicit speakers in novels via symbolization, prompt, and classification. First, SPC symbolizes the mentions of candidate speakers to construct a unified label set. Then, by inserting a prompt we re-formulate speaker identification as a classification task to minimize the gap between the training objectives of speaker identification and the pre-training task. Two auxiliary tasks are also introduced in SPC to enhance long-range context understanding. Experimental results show that SPC outperforms previous methods by a large margin of 4.8% accuracy on the web novel collection, which reduces 47% of speaker identification errors, and also outperforms the emerging ChatGPT. In addition, SPC is more accurate in implicit speaker identification cases that require long-range context semantic understanding.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.225
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3455–3467
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.225
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.225
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yue Chen, Tianwei He, Hongbin Zhou, Jia-Chen Gu, Heng Lu, and Zhen-Hua Ling. 2023. Symbolization, Prompt, and Classification: A Framework for Implicit Speaker Identification in Novels. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 3455–3467, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Symbolization, Prompt, and Classification: A Framework for Implicit Speaker Identification in Novels (Chen et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.225.pdf