# Computational Analysis of Character Development in Holocaust Testimonies

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.17063 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17063/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Dec 2024.

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

- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [BERTopic: Neural topic modeling with a class-based TF-IDF procedure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05794/) (2022)
- ["Let Your Characters Tell Their Story": A Dataset for Character-Centric Narrative Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05438/) (2021)
- [Using Large Language Models for Qualitative Analysis can Introduce Serious Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17147/) (2023)
- [Trajectory Similarity Measurement: An Efficiency Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00960/) (2023)
- [Are NLP Models Good at Tracing Thoughts: An Overview of Narrative Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18783/) (2023)
- [On the Origins of Bias in NLP through the Lens of the Jim Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09281/) (2023)
- [If the Sources Could Talk: Evaluating Large Language Models for Research Assistance in History](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10808/) (2023)
- [Surveying the Dead Minds: Historical-Psychological Text Analysis with Contextualized Construct Representation (CCR) for Classical Chinese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00509/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [The Shape of Testimony: A Scalable Framework for Oral History Archive Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21623/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This work presents a computational approach to analyze character development along the narrative timeline. The analysis characterizes the inner and outer changes the protagonist undergoes within a narrative, and the interplay between them. We consider transcripts of Holocaust survivor testimonies as a test case, each telling the story of an individual in first-person terms. We focus on the survivor's religious trajectory, examining the evolution of their disposition toward religious belief and practice along the testimony. Clustering the resulting trajectories in the dataset, we identify common sequences in the data. Our findings highlight multiple common structures of religiosity across the narratives: in terms of belief, most present a constant disposition, while for practice, most present an oscillating structure, serving as valuable material for historical and sociological research. This work demonstrates the potential of natural language processing techniques for analyzing character evolution through thematic trajectories in narratives.