Direct Speech Identification in Swedish Literature and an Exploration of Training Data Type, Typographical Markers, and Evaluation Granularity

Sara Stymne


Abstract
Identifying direct speech in literary fiction is challenging for cases that do not mark speech segments with quotation marks. Such efforts have previously been based either on smaller manually annotated gold data or larger automatically annotated silver data, extracted from works with quotation marks. However, no direct comparison has so far been made between the performance of these two types of training data. In this work, we address this gap. We further explore the effect of different types of typographical speech marking and of using evaluation metrics of different granularity. We perform experiments on Swedish literary texts and find that using gold and silver data has different strengths, with gold data having stronger results on token-level metrics, whereas silver data overall has stronger results on span-level metrics. If the training data contains some data that matches the typographical speech marking of the target, that is generally sufficient for achieving good results, but it does not seem to hurt if the training data also contains other types of marking.
Anthology ID:
2024.latechclfl-1.25
Volume:
Proceedings of the 8th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature (LaTeCH-CLfL 2024)
Month:
March
Year:
2024
Address:
St. Julians, Malta
Editors:
Yuri Bizzoni, Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Anna Kazantseva, Stan Szpakowicz
Venues:
LaTeCHCLfL | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
253–263
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.latechclfl-1.25
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sara Stymne. 2024. Direct Speech Identification in Swedish Literature and an Exploration of Training Data Type, Typographical Markers, and Evaluation Granularity. In Proceedings of the 8th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature (LaTeCH-CLfL 2024), pages 253–263, St. Julians, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Direct Speech Identification in Swedish Literature and an Exploration of Training Data Type, Typographical Markers, and Evaluation Granularity (Stymne, LaTeCHCLfL-WS 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.latechclfl-1.25.pdf