# Annotating Character Relationships in Literary Texts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.00728 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00728/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 2 Dec 2015.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Few-Shot Character Understanding in Movies as an Assessment to Meta-Learning of Theory-of-Mind](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04684/) (2022)
- [Multi-level Contrastive Learning for Script-based Character Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13231/) (2023)
- [MBTI Personality Prediction for Fictional Characters Using Movie Scripts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10994/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models Fall Short: Understanding Complex Relationships in Detective Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11051/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Machine Narrative Reading Comprehension Assessments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00299/) (2022)
- [A City of Millions: Mapping Literary Social Networks At Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19590/) (2025)
- [Computational Storytelling and Emotions: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10967/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a dataset of manually annotated relationships between characters in literary texts, in order to support the training and evaluation of automatic methods for relation type prediction in this domain (Makazhanov et al., 2014; Kokkinakis, 2013) and the broader computational analysis of literary character (Elson et al., 2010; Bamman et al., 2014; Vala et al., 2015; Flekova and Gurevych, 2015). In this work, we solicit annotations from workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk for 109 texts ranging from Homer's _Iliad_ to Joyce's _Ulysses_ on four dimensions of interest: for a given pair of characters, we collect judgments as to the coarse-grained category (professional, social, familial), fine-grained category (friend, lover, parent, rival, employer), and affinity (positive, negative, neutral) that describes their primary relationship in a text. We do not assume that this relationship is static; we also collect judgments as to whether it changes at any point in the course of the text.