CHIRON: Rich Character Representations in Long-Form Narratives

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Hauptverfasser: Gurung, Alexander, Lapata, Mirella
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Gurung, Alexander
Lapata, Mirella
author_facet Gurung, Alexander
Lapata, Mirella
contents Characters are integral to long-form narratives, but are poorly understood by existing story analysis and generation systems. While prior work has simplified characters via graph-based methods and brief character descriptions, we aim to better tackle the problem of representing complex characters by taking inspiration from advice given to professional writers. We propose CHIRON, a new `character sheet' based representation that organizes and filters textual information about characters. We construct CHIRON sheets in two steps: a Generation Module that prompts an LLM for character information via question-answering and a Validation Module that uses automated reasoning and a domain-specific entailment model to eliminate false facts about a character. We validate CHIRON via the downstream task of masked-character prediction, where our experiments show CHIRON is better and more flexible than comparable summary-based baselines. We also show that metrics derived from CHIRON can be used to automatically infer character-centricity in stories, and that these metrics align with human judgments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_10190
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CHIRON: Rich Character Representations in Long-Form Narratives
Gurung, Alexander
Lapata, Mirella
Computation and Language
Characters are integral to long-form narratives, but are poorly understood by existing story analysis and generation systems. While prior work has simplified characters via graph-based methods and brief character descriptions, we aim to better tackle the problem of representing complex characters by taking inspiration from advice given to professional writers. We propose CHIRON, a new `character sheet' based representation that organizes and filters textual information about characters. We construct CHIRON sheets in two steps: a Generation Module that prompts an LLM for character information via question-answering and a Validation Module that uses automated reasoning and a domain-specific entailment model to eliminate false facts about a character. We validate CHIRON via the downstream task of masked-character prediction, where our experiments show CHIRON is better and more flexible than comparable summary-based baselines. We also show that metrics derived from CHIRON can be used to automatically infer character-centricity in stories, and that these metrics align with human judgments.
title CHIRON: Rich Character Representations in Long-Form Narratives
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.10190