Speaker Identification and Its Application to Social Network Construction for Chinese Novels

Character is one of the three elements of a novel, and conversation is an important way to describe characters. The personality, emotion, and interpersonal relationships of characters are reflected in conversations. Thus, extracting conversations, speakers and other conversation elements from novels are crucial for character analysis and content understanding. We start with Jin Yong’s novels, annotate the largest corpus for speaker identification with 9721 quotes, propose a machine learning-based speaker identification method, and design feature templates showing a good performance. For the application of speaker identification, we construct the social network of characters in Jin Yong’s novels based on dialogue chain, which lays the foundation for the analysis of the relationship between characters in long text novels.