<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="C90-2069">
  <Title>Identifying Subjective Characters in Narrative</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
ABSTRACT
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Part of understanding fictional narrative text is determining for each sentence whether it takes some character's point of view and, if it does, identifying the character whose point of view is taken. This paper presents part of an algorithm for perfomling the latter. When faced with a sentence that takes a character's point of view, the reader has to decide whether that character is a previously mentioned character or one mentioned in the sentence. We give particular consideration to sentences about private states, such as seeing and wanting, for which both possibilities exist. Our algorithm is based on regularities in the ways that texts initiate, continue, and resume a character's point of view, found during extensive examinations of published novels and short stories.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> i. INTRODUCTION. Part of understanding ficfiona~ narrative text is determining for each sentence whether it takes some character's point of view and, if it does, identifying the character whose point of view is taken. This paper addresses the latter. We show how structural regularities of third-person fictional narrative text can be exploited to perform this task.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> 2. BACKGROUNDdeg Our approach to point of view is based on Ann Banfield's (1982) theory of narrative sentences. Banfield characterizes the sentences of narration as objective or subjective.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Objective sentences are those that objectively narrate events. Subjective sentences are those that present the consciousness of an experiencing character within the story. They express characters' evaluations, emotions, judgments, uncertainties, beliefs, and other attitudes and affects. Kinds of subjective sentences include those that portray a character's thought or perception (represented thought or represented perception; Banfield 1982), and those that report a character's private state such as seeing, wanting, or feeling ill---that is, some perceptual, psychological, or experiential state that is not open to objective observation or verification, l We call the character whose consciousness is presented by such a sentence the subjective character of that sentence.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The following passage illustrates different kinds of subjective sentences.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5">  Sentence (1.2) is a private-state report: It reports Zoe's private state of being furious with Joe. Sentence (1.6) is a represented thought: It presents Zoe's thought and it expresses her evaluation of Joe (that he is awful). Represented perceptions appear in the following passage: z'~Certainly, Dennys thought, anything would be better than this horrible-smelling place full of horrible little pedegp~'e2There was a brief whiff of fresh air. 2&amp;quot;3A l_ glimpse of a night sky crusted with stars. LL'Engle, Many Waters, p. 25\] Sentence (2.1) is Dennys's represented thought and (2.2) and (2.3) are Dennys's represented perceptions. null &amp;quot;l-bird-person narrative text is characterized by shifts in point of view: a single text can have objective sentences as well as subjective sentences attributed to different characters. 2 To determine the current point of view, readers cannot consider sentences in isolation. In many cases, it is only in t See Wiebe 1990 and the references therein for alternative categorization~ of subjective sentences.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> 2 There are different kinds of point of view in narrative. The kind addressed here is psychological as opposed to, for example, spatial or temporal (Uspensky 1973). In addition, we do not consider texts that take the point of view of an overt narrator (Chatman 1978).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> context that a sentence is subjective or has a particular subjective character. Sentence (1.6) is such a sentence.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> We have developed an algorithm for recognizing subjective sentences and identifying their subjective characters in third-person fictional narrative text. The algorithm is based on regularities, found during our examination of passages from over forty novels and short stories, in the ways that texts initiate, continue, and resume a character's point of view. The rules of the algorithm were checked, by hand, on over four hundred pages from seven novels. We were able to categorize most exceptions according to particular problems that remain to be addressed, such as the effect of certain spatial and temporal discontinuities on the psychological point of view. These classes of exceptions, together with complete descriptions of the current algorithm and its implementation, can be found in Wiebe 1990. A preliminary version of the algorithm was presented by Wiebe &amp; Rapaport 1988.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>