# Extraction and Analysis of Fictional Character Networks: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.02704 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02704/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jul 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

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- [Tragic and Comical Networks. Clustering Dramatic Genres According to Structural Properties](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08258/) (2023)
- [Automatic Annotation of Direct Speech in Written French Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15634/) (2023)
- [Understanding Social Structures from Contemporary Literary Fiction using Character Interaction Graph -- Half Century Chronology of Influential Bengali Writers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16968/) (2023)
- [A Corpus for Named Entity Recognition in Chinese Novels with Multi-genres](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15509/) (2023)
- [Taggus: An Automated Pipeline for the Extraction of Characters' Social Networks from Portuguese Fiction Literature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03358/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A character network is a graph extracted from a narrative, in which vertices represent characters and edges correspond to interactions between them. A number of narrative-related problems can be addressed automatically through the analysis of character networks, such as summarization, classification, or role detection. Character networks are particularly relevant when considering works of fictions (e.g. novels, plays, movies, TV series), as their exploitation allows developing information retrieval and recommendation systems. However, works of fiction possess specific properties making these tasks harder. This survey aims at presenting and organizing the scientific literature related to the extraction of character networks from works of fiction, as well as their analysis. We first describe the extraction process in a generic way, and explain how its constituting steps are implemented in practice, depending on the medium of the narrative, the goal of the network analysis, and other factors. We then review the descriptive tools used to characterize character networks, with a focus on the way they are interpreted in this context. We illustrate the relevance of character networks by also providing a review of applications derived from their analysis. Finally, we identify the limitations of the existing approaches, and the most promising perspectives.