# Automatic Annotation of Direct Speech in Written French Narratives

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.15634 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15634/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Bidirectional LSTM-CRF Models for Sequence Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.01991/) (2015)
- [CamemBERT: a Tasty French Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03894/) (2019)
- [Advances in Pre-Training Distributed Word Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.09405/) (2017)
- [German's Next Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10906/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Recent Advances in Named Entity Recognition from Deep Learning models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11470/) (2019)
- [Probabilistic FastText for Multi-Sense Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02901/) (2018)
- [TVShowGuess: Character Comprehension in Stories as Speaker Guessing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07721/) (2022)
- [Measuring Information Propagation in Literary Social Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13980/) (2020)
- [Extraction and Analysis of Fictional Character Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02704/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The automatic annotation of direct speech (AADS) in written text has been often used in computational narrative understanding. Methods based on either rules or deep neural networks have been explored, in particular for English or German languages. Yet, for French, our target language, not many works exist. Our goal is to create a unified framework to design and evaluate AADS models in French. For this, we consolidated the largest-to-date French narrative dataset annotated with DS per word; we adapted various baselines for sequence labelling or from AADS in other languages; and we designed and conducted an extensive evaluation focused on generalisation. Results show that the task still requires substantial efforts and emphasise characteristics of each baseline. Although this framework could be improved, it is a step further to encourage more research on the topic.