%0 Conference Paper %1 vishnubhotla-etal-2019-fictional %A Vishnubhotla, Krishnapriya %A Hammond, Adam %A Hirst, Graeme %B Proceedings of the 3rd Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature %C Minneapolis, USA %D 2019 %I Association for Computational Linguistics %K character-voices dfg-antrag-steckbriefe imported %P 29--34 %R 10.18653/v1/W19-2504 %T Are Fictional Voices Distinguishable? Classifying Character Voices in Modern Drama %U https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W19-2504 %X According to the literary theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, a dialogic novel is one in which characters speak in their own distinct voices, rather than serving as mouthpieces for their authors. We use text classification to determine which authors best achieve dialogism, looking at a corpus of plays from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We find that the SAGE model of text generation, which highlights deviations from a background lexical distribution, is an effective method of weighting the words of characters' utterances. Our results show that it is indeed possible to distinguish characters by their speech in the plays of canonical writers such as George Bernard Shaw, whereas characters are clustered more closely in the works of lesser-known playwrights.

@inproceedings{vishnubhotla-etal-2019-fictional, abstract = {According to the literary theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, a dialogic novel is one in which characters speak in their own distinct voices, rather than serving as mouthpieces for their authors. We use text classification to determine which authors best achieve dialogism, looking at a corpus of plays from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We find that the SAGE model of text generation, which highlights deviations from a background lexical distribution, is an effective method of weighting the words of characters{'} utterances. Our results show that it is indeed possible to distinguish characters by their speech in the plays of canonical writers such as George Bernard Shaw, whereas characters are clustered more closely in the works of lesser-known playwrights.}, added-at = {2020-10-23T09:24:05.000+0200}, address = {Minneapolis, USA}, author = {Vishnubhotla, Krishnapriya and Hammond, Adam and Hirst, Graeme}, biburl = {https://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/29fef349f4e3530d53bebe1b39b96f655/albinzehe}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 3rd Joint {SIGHUM} Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature}, doi = {10.18653/v1/W19-2504}, interhash = {2c20cc95b4c78beda77375ba40271584}, intrahash = {9fef349f4e3530d53bebe1b39b96f655}, keywords = {character-voices dfg-antrag-steckbriefe imported}, month = jun, pages = {29--34}, publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics}, timestamp = {2020-10-23T09:32:01.000+0200}, title = {Are Fictional Voices Distinguishable? Classifying Character Voices in Modern Drama}, url = {https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W19-2504}, year = 2019 }