Renard: A Modular Pipeline for Extracting Character Networks from Narrative Texts
This tool addresses the need for flexible and customizable character network extraction in NLP research, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods with added modularity and dynamic capabilities.
The authors tackled the problem of extracting character networks from narrative texts by developing Renard, a modular Python library that allows custom NLP pipelines, enabling extraction of both static and dynamic networks and specialization for different text types.
Renard (Relationships Extraction from NARrative Documents) is a Python library that allows users to define custom natural language processing (NLP) pipelines to extract character networks from narrative texts. Contrary to the few existing tools, Renard can extract dynamic networks, as well as the more common static networks. Renard pipelines are modular: users can choose the implementation of each NLP subtask needed to extract a character network. This allows users to specialize pipelines to particular types of texts and to study the impact of each subtask on the extracted network.