"A Novel of Character": Towards the Automatic Annotation of Characters in a Large Corpus of French Novels

Benjamin Rabu (1) , Frédérique Mélanie-Becquet (1) , Thierry Poibeau (1)

1 Lattice - Lattice - Langues, Textes, Traitements informatiques, Cognition - UMR 8094

In this paper, we apply named entity recognition techniques to a corpus of literary texts, i.e. French novels from the 18 th , 19 th and 20 th century. We obtain results that are usable but could be improved by using advanced annotation techniques. We discuss the use of active learning in this context, as well as the different applications that could be derived from this kind of annotation. In particular, we show that the automatic annotation of large literary corpora makes it possible to check whether traditional classifications exhibit specific structural patterns that could be identified automatically.

Mots clés: Digital Humanities; Named Entity Recognition; Literature Analysis; Distant Reading; Text Mining

Domaines: Traitement du texte et du document; Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]; Informatique; Linguistique; Sciences de l'information et de la communication; Linguistique; Méthodes et statistiques

Benjamin Rabu, Frédérique Mélanie-Becquet, Thierry Poibeau. "A Novel of Character": Towards the Automatic Annotation of Characters in a Large Corpus of French Novels. International Conference on Corpus Linguistics 2019, Jun 2019, Saint Petersbourg, Russia. ⟨hal-02265134⟩