What are they Talking About? A Systematic Exploration of Theme Identification Methods for Character Speech in Dramatic Texts
Nils Reiter, Marcus Willand · Germanistische Symposien · 2022
Zusammenfassung This article systematically explores different methods to describe and compare the thematic content of character speech in drama. The problems here are two-fold: The determination of the theme of a text segment is challenging, as it might be subtle or deliberately hidden. Secondly, the evaluation of this determination is difficult, because gold standards do not exist. We approach these problems by comparing the output of different systems to previously stated expectations (postulates) that are partially derived from drama theory and history. Results show that all systems currently have difficulties reaching high performance numbers. Topic modeling and systems based on a general-purpose dictionary (GermaNet) achieve comparable performance.