The Project Dialogism Novel Corpus: A Dataset for Quotation Attribution in Literary Texts

TL;DR

The paper introduces the Project Dialogism Novel Corpus, a large annotated dataset of quotations in English literary texts, enabling improved evaluation of quotation attribution and coreference models.

Contribution

It provides the largest annotated corpus of literary quotations with detailed annotations, facilitating research in quotation attribution and coreference in literature.

Findings

Largest corpus of its kind with 35,978 quotations

Detailed annotations for speaker, addressees, and references

Enables comprehensive evaluation of attribution models

Abstract

We present the Project Dialogism Novel Corpus, or PDNC, an annotated dataset of quotations for English literary texts. PDNC contains annotations for 35,978 quotations across 22 full-length novels, and is by an order of magnitude the largest corpus of its kind. Each quotation is annotated for the speaker, addressees, type of quotation, referring expression, and character mentions within the quotation text. The annotated attributes allow for a comprehensive evaluation of models of quotation attribution and coreference for literary texts.