Automatic Annotation of Direct Speech in Written French Narratives
This work addresses a gap in computational narrative understanding for French, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods from other languages.
The authors tackled the problem of automatically annotating direct speech in French narratives by creating a unified framework and the largest annotated French dataset for the task, finding that the task remains challenging and highlighting baseline characteristics.
The automatic annotation of direct speech (AADS) in written text has been often used in computational narrative understanding. Methods based on either rules or deep neural networks have been explored, in particular for English or German languages. Yet, for French, our target language, not many works exist. Our goal is to create a unified framework to design and evaluate AADS models in French. For this, we consolidated the largest-to-date French narrative dataset annotated with DS per word; we adapted various baselines for sequence labelling or from AADS in other languages; and we designed and conducted an extensive evaluation focused on generalisation. Results show that the task still requires substantial efforts and emphasise characteristics of each baseline. Although this framework could be improved, it is a step further to encourage more research on the topic.