# Multi-level Contrastive Learning for Script-based Character Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.13231 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13231/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02860/) (2019)
- [Big Bird: Transformers for Longer Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14062/) (2020)
- [Oscar: Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06165/) (2020)
- [SpanBERT: Improving Pre-training by Representing and Predicting Spans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10529/) (2019)
- [Pre-trained Models for Natural Language Processing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08271/) (2020)
- [Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing via Large Pre-Trained Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01243/) (2021)
- [A Corpus and Evaluation Framework for Deeper Understanding of Commonsense Stories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01696/) (2016)
- [Unified Contrastive Learning in Image-Text-Label Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03610/) (2022)
- [A Knowledge-Enhanced Pretraining Model for Commonsense Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.05139/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Learning for Many-to-many Multilingual Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09501/) (2021)
- [Self-Guided Contrastive Learning for BERT Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07345/) (2021)
- [MISC: A MIxed Strategy-Aware Model Integrating COMET for Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13560/) (2022)
- [ERICA: Improving Entity and Relation Understanding for Pre-trained Language Models via Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15022/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Learning with Adversarial Perturbations for Conditional Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07280/) (2020)
- ["Let Your Characters Tell Their Story": A Dataset for Character-Centric Narrative Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05438/) (2021)
- [Frowning Frodo, Wincing Leia, and a Seriously Great Friendship: Learning to Classify Emotional Relationships of Fictional Characters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12453/) (2019)
- [Logic-Consistency Text Generation from Semantic Parses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00577/) (2021)
- [Personality Understanding of Fictional Characters during Book Reading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10156/) (2023)
- [GL-CLeF: A Global-Local Contrastive Learning Framework for Cross-lingual Spoken Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08325/) (2022)
- [Self- and Pseudo-self-supervised Prediction of Speaker and Key-utterance for Multi-party Dialogue Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03772/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Machine Narrative Reading Comprehension Assessments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00299/) (2022)
- [Fine-grained Contrastive Learning for Definition Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00543/) (2022)
- [Annotating Character Relationships in Literary Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00728/) (2015)
- [Fine-grained Contrastive Learning for Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12491/) (2022)
- [Joint Coreference Resolution and Character Linking for Multiparty Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11204/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [From Persona to Personalization: A Survey on Role-Playing Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18231/) (2024)
- [DALK: Dynamic Co-Augmentation of LLMs and KG to answer Alzheimer's Disease Questions with Scientific Literature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04819/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Character Understanding of Large Language Models via Character Profiling from Fictional Works](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12726/) (2024)
- [SMoA: Improving Multi-agent Large Language Models with Sparse Mixture-of-Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03284/) (2024)
- [Contextualization Distillation from Large Language Model for Knowledge Graph Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01729/) (2024)
- [Beyond Math: Stories as a Testbed for Memorization-Constrained Reasoning in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14368/) (2024)
- [A Question-centric Multi-experts Contrastive Learning Framework for Improving the Accuracy and Interpretability of Deep Sequential Knowledge Tracing Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07322/) (2024)
- [Distinguishing Fictional Voices: a Study of Authorship Verification Models for Quotation Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16968/) (2024)
- [Understanding Multimodal Deep Neural Networks: A Concept Selection View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08964/) (2024)
- [Improving Low-Resource Knowledge Tracing Tasks by Supervised Pre-training and Importance Mechanism Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06725/) (2024)
- [Balancing Speciality and Versatility: A Coarse to Fine Framework for Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10306/) (2024)
- [Improving Quotation Attribution with Fictional Character Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11368/) (2024)
- [CHATTER: A Character Attribution Dataset for Narrative Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05227/) (2024)
- [GraphLit: Learning Text-Enriched Dynamic Character Network Representations for Literary Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28643/) (2026)
- [CASPER in the Machine: Insights into Character Variety in LLM-Generated Stories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22454/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we tackle the scenario of understanding characters in scripts, which aims to learn the characters' personalities and identities from their utterances. We begin by analyzing several challenges in this scenario, and then propose a multi-level contrastive learning framework to capture characters' global information in a fine-grained manner. To validate the proposed framework, we conduct extensive experiments on three character understanding sub-tasks by comparing with strong pre-trained language models, including SpanBERT, Longformer, BigBird and ChatGPT-3.5. Experimental results demonstrate that our method improves the performances by a considerable margin. Through further in-depth analysis, we show the effectiveness of our method in addressing the challenges and provide more hints on the scenario of character understanding. We will open-source our work on github at https://github.com/David-Li0406/Script-based-Character-Understanding.