Roberto Togneri


2018

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NovelPerspective: Identifying Point of View Characters
Lyndon White | Roberto Togneri | Wei Liu | Mohammed Bennamoun
Proceedings of ACL 2018, System Demonstrations

We present NovelPerspective: a tool to allow consumers to subset their digital literature, based on point of view (POV) character. Many novels have multiple main characters each with their own storyline running in parallel. A well-known example is George R. R. Martin’s novel: “A Game of Thrones”, and others from that series. Our tool detects the main character that each section is from the POV of, and allows the user to generate a new ebook with only those sections. This gives consumers new options in how they consume their media; allowing them to pursue the storylines sequentially, or skip chapters about characters they find boring. We present two heuristic-based baselines, and two machine learning based methods for the detection of the main character.