Paper ID: 2210.07871

One Graph to Rule them All: Using NLP and Graph Neural Networks to analyse Tolkien's Legendarium

Vincenzo Perri, Lisi Qarkaxhija, Albin Zehe, Andreas Hotho, Ingo Scholtes

Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning have considerably advanced Computational Literary Studies. Similarly, the construction of co-occurrence networks of literary characters, and their analysis using methods from social network analysis and network science, have provided insights into the micro- and macro-level structure of literary texts. Combining these perspectives, in this work we study character networks extracted from a text corpus of J.R.R. Tolkien's Legendarium. We show that this perspective helps us to analyse and visualise the narrative style that characterises Tolkien's works. Addressing character classification, embedding and co-occurrence prediction, we further investigate the advantages of state-of-the-art Graph Neural Networks over a popular word embedding method. Our results highlight the large potential of graph learning in Computational Literary Studies.

Submitted: Oct 14, 2022