Dr. Livingstone, I presume? Polishing of foreign character identification in literary texts

Abstract

Character identification is a key element for many narrative-related tasks. To implement it, the baseform of the name of the character (or lemma) needs to be identified, so different appearances of the same character in the narrative could be aligned. In this paper we tackle this problem in translated texts (English-Finnish translation direction), where the challenge regarding lemmatizing foreign names in an agglutinative language appears. To solve this problem, we present and compare several methods. The results show that the method based on a search for the shortest version of the name proves to be the easiest, best performing (83.4% F 1 ), and most resource-independent.