Named Entity Recognition and Resolution for Literary Studies

Abstract

This paper reports on the project Namescape: Mapping the Landscape of Names in Modern Dutch Literature, funded by CLARIN-NL. The background of the project is research in literary onomastics, the study of the usage and functions of proper names in literary (i.e. fictional) texts. The two main tasks for the project were to adapt existing Named Entity Recognition software to modern Dutch fiction, and to perform Named Entity Resolution by linking the names to Wikipedia entries. For Named Entity Recognition, existing tools have been trained on literary texts and a new NE tagger has been developed. The standard list of name categories had to be extended, since the analysis of the usage of proper names in literature needs to distinguish e.g. between first names and family names. The Named Entity Resolution task was done to explore the possibility of labeling the names in fiction in another way, by categorizing a name as referring to a person or location that only exist in the story of a fictional work (plot-internal names), or one referring to a person or location in the real world (plot-external names). This distinction is linked to the hypothesis that plot-internal and plot-external names can have different (stylistic and narrative) functions. Automatically marking them up is the first step toward testing that hypothesis on a large corpus. In this paper we describe the results of these two main tasks.