Information retrieval in folktales using natural language processing

TL;DR

This paper presents a natural language processing approach to extract and analyze literary characters in folktales by leveraging domain ontologies based on Propp's folktale model.

Contribution

It introduces a novel system that combines NLP and reasoning on a folktale ontology to identify characters and their story segments.

Findings

Successful identification of main characters in folktales

Effective mapping of story parts to character actions

Demonstration of system in folktale domain

Abstract

Our aim is to extract information about literary characters in unstructured texts. We employ natural language processing and reasoning on domain ontologies. The first task is to identify the main characters and the parts of the story where these characters are described or act. We illustrate the system in a scenario in the folktale domain. The system relies on a folktale ontology that we have developed based on Propp's model for folktales morphology.