Generating Character Descriptions for Automatic Summarization of Fiction
By Weiwei Zhang, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung, Joel Oren. 2019
24 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Summaries of fictional stories allow readers to quickly decide whether or not a story catches their interest. A major challenge in automatic summarization of fiction is the lack of standardized evaluation methodology or high-quality datasets for experimentation. In this work, we take a bottomup approach to this problem by assuming that story authors are uniquely qualified to inform such decisions. We collect a dataset of one million fiction stories with accompanying author-written summaries from Wattpad, an online story sharing platform. We identify commonly occurring summary components, of which a description of the main characters is the most frequent, and elicit descriptions of main characters directly from the authors for a sample of the stories. We propose two approaches to generate character descriptions, one based on ranking attributes found in the story text, the other based on classifying into a list of pre-defined attributes. We find that the classification-based approach performs the best in predicting character descriptions.
Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Artificial Intelligence
- Mohit Bansal
- Caiming Xiong
- Percy Liang
- Yejin Choi
- Luke S. Zettlemoyer
- Richard Socher
- Jianfeng Gao
- Kyunghyun Cho
In Natural Language Processing
- Caiming Xiong
- Dragomir R. Radev
- Mohit Bansal
- Faisal Ladhak
- K. McKeown
- Nazneen Rajani
- Wojciech Kryscinski
- Yejin Choi
Citations in the corpus
- Recursively Summarizing Books with Human Feedback (2021, methodology): “, 2020) or focused on shorter stories (Kazantseva, 2006; Zhang et al., 2019b).”
- Exploring Content Selection in Summarization of Novel Chapters (2020, background): “More recently, Zhang et al. (2019) developed an approach for summarizing characters within a novel.”
- BookSum: A Collection of Datasets for Long-form Narrative Summarization (2021, background): “More recently, Zhang et al. (2019b) tackled the problem of generating character descriptions based on short fiction stories.”