Abstract
According to the literary theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, a dialogic novel is one in which characters speak in their own distinct voices, rather than serving as mouthpieces for their authors. We use text classification to determine which authors best achieve dialogism, looking at a corpus of plays from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We find that the SAGE model of text generation, which highlights deviations from a background lexical distribution, is an effective method of weighting the words of characters’ utterances. Our results show that it is indeed possible to distinguish characters by their speech in the plays of canonical writers such as George Bernard Shaw, whereas characters are clustered more closely in the works of lesser-known playwrights.- Anthology ID:
- W19-2504
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 3rd Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2019
- Address:
- Minneapolis, USA
- Venue:
- LaTeCH
- SIG:
- SIGHUM
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 29–34
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/W19-2504
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/W19-2504
- Cite (ACL):
- Krishnapriya Vishnubhotla, Adam Hammond, and Graeme Hirst. 2019. Are Fictional Voices Distinguishable? Classifying Character Voices in Modern Drama. In Proceedings of the 3rd Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature, pages 29–34, Minneapolis, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Are Fictional Voices Distinguishable? Classifying Character Voices in Modern Drama (Vishnubhotla et al., LaTeCH 2019)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/remove-xml-comments/W19-2504.pdf