Detecting protagonists in German plays around 1800 as a classification task

Abstract

In this paper, we aim at identifying protagonists in plays automatically. To this end, we train a classifier using various features and investigate the importance of each feature. A challenging aspect here is that the number of spoken words for a character is a very strong baseline. We can show, however, that a) the stage presence of characters and b) topics used in their speech can help to detect protagonists even above the baseline.