A Corpus of Quotation Element Annotation for Chinese Novels: Construction, Extraction and Application

Quotations or dialogues are important for literary works, like novels. In the famous Jin Yong’s novels, about a half of all sentences contain quotations. Quotation elements like speaker, speech mode, speech cue and the quotation itself are very useful to the analysis of fictional characters. To build models for automatic quotation element extraction, we construct the first quotation corpus with annotation of all the four quotation elements, and the corpus size of 31,922 quotations is one of the largest to our knowledge. Based on the corpus, we compare different models for quotation element extraction and conduct extensive experiments. For the application of extracted quotation elements, we explore character recognition and gender classification, and find out that quotation and speech mode are effective for the two tasks. We will extend our work from Jin Yong’s novels to other novels to analyze various characters from different angles based on quotation structures.