Finding a Character’s Voice: Stylome Classification on Literary Characters

Liviu P. Dinu, Ana Sabina Uban


Abstract
We investigate in this paper the problem of classifying the stylome of characters in a literary work. Previous research in the field of authorship attribution has shown that the writing style of an author can be characterized and distinguished from that of other authors automatically. In this paper we take a look at the less approached problem of how the styles of different characters can be distinguished, trying to verify if an author managed to create believable characters with individual styles. We present the results of some initial experiments developed on the novel “Liaisons Dangereuses”, showing that a simple bag of words model can be used to classify the characters.
Anthology ID:
W17-2210
Volume:
Proceedings of the Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature
Month:
August
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Beatrice Alex, Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Anna Feldman, Anna Kazantseva, Nils Reiter, Stan Szpakowicz
Venue:
LaTeCH
SIG:
SIGHUM
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
78–82
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-2210
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-2210
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Liviu P. Dinu and Ana Sabina Uban. 2017. Finding a Character’s Voice: Stylome Classification on Literary Characters. In Proceedings of the Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature, pages 78–82, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Finding a Character’s Voice: Stylome Classification on Literary Characters (Dinu & Uban, LaTeCH 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-2210.pdf