Creating Character Networks with Kinship Relations from Comics

Abstract

To find and understand comic contents, we present an approach of creating character networks with semantic relations from comics using the panels and speech balloons. First, we build a dataset that contains a comic's characters and its words in speech balloons separated by the panels. Second, we extract the semantic relations among characters using the words in the speech balloons and panels. Third, we develop character networks by identifying the important characters using the frequencies of characters and their relatedness, and then we add semantic relations to these networks. As an initial step in finding semantic relations, we focus on kinship relations. We implement our approach and successfully build character networks from four popular Japanese comics. Finally, we evaluate our kinship relation extraction algorithms and the created character networks.

Complex Network Analysis of a Graphic Novel: The Case of the Bande Dessinée Thorgal

“…[1,20], and also use the dataset available online g . Unfortunately, the Manga-and Webtoon-based datasets respectively constituted by Murakami et al [39,40,41] and Lee & Kim [30] are not available and consequently could not be included in this comparison. Note that we focus on the filtered version of Thorgal, as only the main characters are considered in the other datasets.…”