# What time is it? Temporal Analysis of Novels

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.04124 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04124/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 9 Nov 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Unified Text Structuralization with Instruction-tuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14956/) (2023)
- [Prosody Analysis of Audiobooks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06930/) (2023)
- [Analyzing Film Adaptation through Narrative Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04020/) (2023)
- [Transformer-Based Temporal Information Extraction and Application: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07470/) (2025)
- [A Semantic Parsing Framework for End-to-End Time Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06450/) (2025)
- [FocalLens: Visualizing Narratives through Focalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14456/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recognizing the flow of time in a story is a crucial aspect of understanding it. Prior work related to time has primarily focused on identifying temporal expressions or relative sequencing of events, but here we propose computationally annotating each line of a book with wall clock times, even in the absence of explicit time-descriptive phrases. To do so, we construct a data set of hourly time phrases from 52,183 fictional books. We then construct a time-of-day classification model that achieves an average error of 2.27 hours. Furthermore, we show that by analyzing a book in whole using dynamic programming of breakpoints, we can roughly partition a book into segments that each correspond to a particular time-of-day. This approach improves upon baselines by over two hours. Finally, we apply our model to a corpus of literature categorized by different periods in history, to show interesting trends of hourly activity throughout the past. Among several observations we find that the fraction of events taking place past 10 P.M jumps past 1880 - coincident with the advent of the electric light bulb and city lights.