This paper introduces the novel task of scene segmentation on narrative texts and provides an annotated corpus, a discussion of the linguistic and narrative properties of the task and baseline experiments towards automatic solutions. A scene here is a segment of the text where time and discourse time are more or less equal, the narration focuses on one action and location and character constellations stay the same. The corpus we describe consists of German-language dime novels (550k tokens) that have been annotated in parallel, achieving an inter-annotator agreement of gamma = 0.7. Baseline experiments using BERT achieve an F1 score of 24%, showing that the task is very challenging. An automatic scene segmentation paves the way towards processing longer narrative texts like tales or novels by breaking them down into smaller, coherent and meaningful parts, which is an important stepping stone towards the reconstruction of plot in Computational Literary Studies but also can serve to improve tasks like coreference resolution.

This paper presents a data set of German fairy tales, manually annotated with character networks which were obtained with high inter rater agreement. The release of this corpus provides an opportunity of training and comparing different algorithms for the extraction of character networks, which so far was barely possible due to heterogeneous interests of previous researchers. We demonstrate the usefulness of our data set by providing baseline experiments for the automatic extraction of character networks, applying a rule-based pipeline as well as a neural approach, and find the neural approach outperforming the rule-approach in most evaluation settings.