CHATTER: A character-attribution dataset for narrative understanding

Sabyasachee Baruah, Shrikanth Narayanan


Abstract
Computational narrative understanding studies the identification, description, and interaction of the elements of a narrative: characters, attributes, events, and relations.Narrative research has given considerable attention to defining and classifying character types.However, these character-type taxonomies do not generalize well because they are small, too simple, or specific to a domain.We require robust and reliable benchmarks to test whether narrative models truly understand the nuances of the character’s development in the story.Our work addresses this by curating the CHATTER dataset that labels whether a character portrays some attribute for 88124 character-attribute pairs, encompassing 2998 characters, 12967 attributes and 660 movies.We validate a subset of CHATTER, called CHATTEREVAL, using human annotations to serve as an evaluation benchmark for the character attribution task in movie scripts.CHATTEREVAL also assesses narrative understanding and the long-context modeling capacity of language models.
Anthology ID:
2025.wnu-1.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the The 7th Workshop on Narrative Understanding
Month:
May
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Elizabeth Clark, Yash Kumar Lal, Snigdha Chaturvedi, Mohit Iyyer, Anneliese Brei, Ashutosh Modi, Khyathi Raghavi Chandu
Venues:
WNU | WS
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
52–63
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/Author-page-Marten-During-lu/2025.wnu-1.11/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sabyasachee Baruah and Shrikanth Narayanan. 2025. CHATTER: A character-attribution dataset for narrative understanding. In Proceedings of the The 7th Workshop on Narrative Understanding, pages 52–63, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CHATTER: A character-attribution dataset for narrative understanding (Baruah & Narayanan, WNU 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/Author-page-Marten-During-lu/2025.wnu-1.11.pdf