Portrayal: Leveraging NLP and Visualization for Analyzing Fictional Characters

Md Naimul Hoque; Bhavya Ghai; Kari Kraus; Niklas Elmqvist

doi:10.1145/3563657.3596000

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Portrayal: Leveraging NLP and Visualization for Analyzing Fictional Characters

Conference proceeding

Open access

Portrayal: Leveraging NLP and Visualization for Analyzing Fictional Characters

Md Naimul Hoque, Bhavya Ghai, Kari Kraus and Niklas Elmqvist

Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference, pp.74-94

ACM Conferences

DIS '23: Designing Interactive Systems Conference

07/10/2023

DOI: 10.1145/3563657.3596000

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Abstract

Many creative writing tasks (e.g., fiction writing) require authors to write complex narrative components (e.g., characterization, events, dialogue) over the course of a long story. Similarly, literary scholars need to manually annotate and interpret texts to understand such abstract components. In this paper, we explore how Natural Language Processing (NLP) and interactive visualization can help writers and scholars in such scenarios. To this end, we present Portrayal, an interactive visualization system for analyzing characters in a story. Portrayal extracts natural language indicators from a text to capture the characterization process and then visualizes the indicators in an interactive interface. We evaluated the system with 12 creative writers and scholars in a one-week-long qualitative study. Our findings suggest Portrayal helped writers revise their drafts and create dynamic characters and scenes. It helped scholars analyze characters without the need for any manual annotation, and design literary arguments with concrete evidence.

Human-centered computing -- Visualization -- Visualization systems and tools

Details

Title: Subtitle: Portrayal: Leveraging NLP and Visualization for Analyzing Fictional Characters
Creators: Md Naimul Hoque - University of Maryland, College Park
Bhavya Ghai - Stony Brook University
Kari Kraus - University of Maryland, College Park
Niklas Elmqvist - University of Maryland, College Park
Contributors: Daragh Byrne (Editor) - Carnegie Mellon University
Nikolas Martelaro (Editor) - Carnegie Mellon University
Andy Boucher (Editor) - Northumbria University
David Chatting (Editor) - Goldsmiths University of London
Sarah Fdili Alaoui (Editor) - Université Paris-Saclay
Sarah Fox (Editor) - Carnegie Mellon University
Iohanna Nicenboim (Editor) - Delft University of Technology
Cayley MacArthur (Editor) - University of Waterloo
Resource Type: Conference proceeding
Publication Details: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference, pp.74-94
Conference: DIS '23: Designing Interactive Systems Conference
Series: ACM Conferences
DOI: 10.1145/3563657.3596000
Publisher: ACM
Number of pages: 21
Language: English
Date published: 07/10/2023
Academic Unit: Computer Science
Record Identifier: 9984787456002771

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