NOVEL2GRAPH: Visual Summaries of Narrative Text Enhanced by Machine Learning

A machine learning approach to the creation of visual summaries for narrative text is presented. Standard natural language processing tools for named entities recognition are used together with a clustering algorithm to detect the characters of the novel and their aliases. The most relevant ones and their relations are evaluated on the basis of a simple statistical analysis. These characters are visually depicted as nodes of an undirected graph whose edges describe relations with other characters. Specialized sentiment analysis techniques based on sentence embedding decide the colours of characters/nodes and their relations/edges. Additional information about the characters (e.g., gender) and their relations (e.g., siblings or partnerships) are returned by binary classifiers and visually depicted in the graph. For those specialized tasks, small amounts of manually annotated data are sufficient to achieve good accuracy. Compared to analogous tools, the machine learning approach we present allows for a richer representation of texts of this kind. A case study to demonstrate this approach for a series of books is also reported.