“Let Your Characters Tell Their Story”: A Dataset for Character-Centric Narrative Understanding
Faeze Brahman, Meng Huang, Oyvind Tafjord, Chao Zhao, Mrinmaya Sachan, Snigdha Chaturvedi · 2021
When reading a literary piece, readers often make inferences about various characters' roles, personalities, relationships, intents, actions, etc.While humans can readily draw upon their past experiences to build such a character-centric view of the narrative, understanding characters in narratives can be a challenging task for machines.To encourage research in this field of character-centric narrative understanding, we present LiSCU -a new dataset of literary pieces and their summaries paired with descriptions of characters that appear in them.We also introduce two new tasks on LiSCU: Character Identification and Character Description Generation.Our experiments with several pre-trained language models adapted for these tasks demonstrate that there is a need for better models of narrative comprehension.1