Extracting Family Relationship Networks from Novels
This work addresses a domain-specific problem in computational linguistics for literary analysis, and is incremental as it builds on existing techniques.
The authors tackled the problem of extracting family relationship networks from literary narratives by combining utterance attribution with vocative detection, and applied their method to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, reporting results from this specific novel.
We present an approach to the extraction of family relations from literary narrative, which incorporates a technique for utterance attribution proposed recently by Elson and McKeown (2010). In our work this technique is used in combination with the detection of vocatives - the explicit forms of address used by the characters in a novel. We take advantage of the fact that certain vocatives indicate family relations between speakers. The extracted relations are then propagated using a set of rules. We report the results of the application of our method to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.