Feuding Families and Former Friends: Unsupervised Learning for Dynamic Fictional Relationships

Abstract

Understanding how a fictional relationship between two characters changes over time (e.g., from best friends to sworn enemies) is a key challenge in digital humanities scholarship. We present a novel unsupervised neural network for this task that incorporates dictionary learning to generate interpretable, accurate relationship trajectories. While previous work on characterizing literary relationships relies on plot summaries annotated with predefined labels, our model jointly learns a set of global relationship descriptors as well as a trajectory over these descriptors for each relationship in a dataset of raw text from novels. We find that our model learns descriptors of events (e.g., marriage or murder) as well as interpersonal states (love, sadness). Our model outperforms topic model baselines on two crowdsourced tasks, and we also find interesting correlations to annotations in an existing dataset.