Paper ID: 2307.03734

Improving Automatic Quotation Attribution in Literary Novels

Krishnapriya Vishnubhotla, Frank Rudzicz, Graeme Hirst, Adam Hammond

Current models for quotation attribution in literary novels assume varying levels of available information in their training and test data, which poses a challenge for in-the-wild inference. Here, we approach quotation attribution as a set of four interconnected sub-tasks: character identification, coreference resolution, quotation identification, and speaker attribution. We benchmark state-of-the-art models on each of these sub-tasks independently, using a large dataset of annotated coreferences and quotations in literary novels (the Project Dialogism Novel Corpus). We also train and evaluate models for the speaker attribution task in particular, showing that a simple sequential prediction model achieves accuracy scores on par with state-of-the-art models.

Submitted: Jul 7, 2023