The Legend of the Condor Heroes (LCH) is one of the fifteen well-known Wuxia novels penned by Jin Yong. It portrays a number of characters in the background of the Southern Song Dynasty. In this research, we attempt to analyze the relationship of characters in LCH based on social network, including network feature analysis, cluster analysis, and data visualization. Moreover, the approach can be extended to other literary works because our research provides a general framework for analyzing character relationships. We first perform lexical analysis on the corpus to extract character names and then utilize co-word analysis to build a social network of character relationships. We reckon characters as nodes and count the cooccurrences of characters as weights of links. By applying the social network analysis of created network, we can obtain network features of LCH. Furthermore, a hierarchical clustering algorithm is implemented to study the structure of LCH network. Both the dendrogram and Venn diagram are used for data visualization. An improved approach of visualizing the clustering results is advanced in order to display the group and hierarchical structure better. The final experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method shows a good effect.

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