Algorithmic sequence alignment identifies similar segments shared between pairs of documents, and is fundamental to many NLP tasks. But it is difficult to recognize similarities between distant versions of narratives such as translations and retellings, particularly for summaries and abridgements which are much shorter than the original novels. We develop a general approach to narrative alignment coupling the Smith-Waterman algorithm from bioinformatics with modern text similarity metrics. We show that the background of alignment scores fits a Gumbel distribution, enabling us to define rigorous p-values on the significance of any alignment. We apply and evaluate our general narrative alignment tool (GNAT) on four distinct problem domains differing greatly in both the relative and absolute length of documents, namely summary-to-book alignment, translated book alignment, short story alignment, and plagiarism detection—demonstrating the power and performance of our methods.

Novels are often adapted into feature films, but the differences between the two media usually require dropping sections of the source text from the movie script. Here we study this screen adaptation process by constructing narrative alignments using the Smith-Waterman local alignment algorithm coupled with SBERT embedding distance to quantify text similarity between scenes and book units. We use these alignments to perform an automated analysis of 40 adaptations, revealing insights into the screenwriting process concerning (i) faithfulness of adaptation, (ii) importance of dialog, (iii) preservation of narrative order, and (iv) gender representation issues reflective of the Bechdel test.

We address the problem of learning fixed-length vector representations of characters in novels. Recent advances in word embeddings have proven successful in learning entity representations from short texts, but fall short on longer documents because they do not capture full book-level information. To overcome the weakness of such text-based embeddings, we propose two novel methods for representing characters: (i) graph neural network-based embeddings from a full corpus-based character network; and (ii) low-dimensional embeddings constructed from the occurrence pattern of characters in each novel. We test the quality of these character embeddings using a new benchmark suite to evaluate character representations, encompassing 12 different tasks. We show that our representation techniques combined with text-based embeddings lead to the best character representations, outperforming text-based embeddings in four tasks. Our dataset and evaluation script will be made publicly available to stimulate additional work in this area.

Understanding narrative flow and text coherence in long-form documents (novels) remains an open problem in NLP.To gain insight, we explore the task of chapter ordering, reconstructing the original order of chapters in novel given a random permutation of the text. This can be seen as extending the well-known sentence ordering task to vastly larger documents: our task deals with over 9,000 novels with an average of twenty chapters each, versus standard sentence ordering datasets averaging only 5-8 sentences. We formulate the task of reconstructing order as a constraint solving problem, using minimum feedback arc set and traveling salesman problem optimization criteria, where the weights of the graph are generated based on models for character occurrences and chapter boundary detection, using relational chapter scores derived from RoBERTa. Our best methods yield a Spearman correlation of 0.59 on this novel and challenging task, substantially above baseline.

Substantial amounts of work are required to clean large collections of digitized books for NLP analysis, both because of the presence of errors in the scanned text and the presence of duplicate volumes in the corpora. In this paper, we consider the issue of deduplication in the presence of optical character recognition (OCR) errors. We present methods to handle these errors, evaluated on a collection of 19,347 texts from the Project Gutenberg dataset and 96,635 texts from the HathiTrust Library. We demonstrate that improvements in language models now enable the detection and correction of OCR errors without consideration of the scanning image itself. The inconsistencies found by aligning pairs of scans of the same underlying work provides training data to build models for detecting and correcting errors. We identify the canonical version for each of 17,136 repeatedly-scanned books from 58,808 scans. Finally, we investigate methods to detect and correct errors in single-copy texts. We show that on average, our method corrects over six times as many errors as it introduces. We also provide interesting analysis on the relation between scanning quality and other factors such as location and publication year.

Books are typically segmented into chapters and sections, representing coherent sub-narratives and topics. We investigate the task of predicting chapter boundaries, as a proxy for the general task of segmenting long texts. We build a Project Gutenberg chapter segmentation data set of 9,126 English novels, using a hybrid approach combining neural inference and rule matching to recognize chapter title headers in books, achieving an F1-score of 0.77 on this task. Using this annotated data as ground truth after removing structural cues, we present cut-based and neural methods for chapter segmentation, achieving a F1-score of 0.453 on the challenging task of exact break prediction over book-length documents. Finally, we reveal interesting historical trends in the chapter structure of novels.

Recognizing the flow of time in a story is a crucial aspect of understanding it. Prior work related to time has primarily focused on identifying temporal expressions or relative sequencing of events, but here we propose computationally annotating each line of a book with wall clock times, even in the absence of explicit time-descriptive phrases. To do so, we construct a data set of hourly time phrases from 52,183 fictional books. We then construct a time-of-day classification model that achieves an average error of 2.27 hours. Furthermore, we show that by analyzing a book in whole using dynamic programming of breakpoints, we can roughly partition a book into segments that each correspond to a particular time-of-day. This approach improves upon baselines by over two hour. Finally, we apply our model to a corpus of literature categorized by different periods in history, to show interesting trends of hourly activity throughout the past. Among several observations we find that the fraction of events taking place past 10 P.M jumps past 1880 - coincident with the advent of the electric light bulb and city lights.

The sequence of documents produced by any given author varies in style and content, but some documents are more typical or representative of the source than others. We quantify the extent to which a given short text is characteristic of a specific person, using a dataset of tweets from fifteen celebrities. Such analysis is useful for generating excerpts of high-volume Twitter profiles, and understanding how representativeness relates to tweet popularity. We first consider the related task of binary author detection (is x the author of text T?), and report a test accuracy of 90.37% for the best of five approaches to this problem. We then use these models to compute characterization scores among all of an author’s texts. A user study shows human evaluators agree with our characterization model for all 15 celebrities in our dataset, each with p-value < 0.05. We use these classifiers to show surprisingly strong correlations between characterization scores and the popularity of the associated texts. Indeed, we demonstrate a statistically significant correlation between this score and tweet popularity (likes/replies/retweets) for 13 of the 15 celebrities in our study.

Bilingual word embeddings have been widely used to capture the correspondence of lexical semantics in different human languages. However, the cross-lingual correspondence between sentences and words is less studied, despite that this correspondence can significantly benefit many applications such as crosslingual semantic search and textual inference. To bridge this gap, we propose a neural embedding model that leverages bilingual dictionaries. The proposed model is trained to map the lexical definitions to the cross-lingual target words, for which we explore with different sentence encoding techniques. To enhance the learning process on limited resources, our model adopts several critical learning strategies, including multi-task learning on different bridges of languages, and joint learning of the dictionary model with a bilingual word embedding model. We conduct experiments on two new tasks. In the cross-lingual reverse dictionary retrieval task, we demonstrate that our model is capable of comprehending bilingual concepts based on descriptions, and the proposed learning strategies are effective. In the bilingual paraphrase identification task, we show that our model effectively associates sentences in different languages via a shared embedding space, and outperforms existing approaches in identifying bilingual paraphrases.

A news article’s title, content and link structure often reveal its political ideology. However, most existing works on automatic political ideology detection only leverage textual cues. Drawing inspiration from recent advances in neural inference, we propose a novel attention based multi-view model to leverage cues from all of the above views to identify the ideology evinced by a news article. Our model draws on advances in representation learning in natural language processing and network science to capture cues from both textual content and the network structure of news articles. We empirically evaluate our model against a battery of baselines and show that our model outperforms state of the art by 10 percentage points F1 score.

We present domain independent models to date documents based only on neologism usage patterns. Our models capture patterns of neologism usage over time to date texts, provide insights into temporal locality of word usage over a span of 150 years, and generalize to various domains like News, Fiction, and Non-Fiction with competitive performance. Quite intriguingly, we show that by modeling only the distribution of usage counts over neologisms (the model being agnostic of the particular words themselves), we achieve competitive performance using several orders of magnitude fewer features (only 200 input features) compared to state of the art models some of which use 200K features.