"Let Your Characters Tell Their Story": A Dataset for Character-Centric Narrative Understanding

When reading a literary piece, readers often make inferences about various\ncharacters' roles, personalities, relationships, intents, actions, etc. While\nhumans can readily draw upon their past experiences to build such a\ncharacter-centric view of the narrative, understanding characters in narratives\ncan be a challenging task for machines. To encourage research in this field of\ncharacter-centric narrative understanding, we present LiSCU -- a new dataset of\nliterary pieces and their summaries paired with descriptions of characters that\nappear in them. We also introduce two new tasks on LiSCU: Character\nIdentification and Character Description Generation. Our experiments with\nseveral pre-trained language models adapted for these tasks demonstrate that\nthere is a need for better models of narrative comprehension.\n