Network Extraction and Analysis of Character Relationships in Chinese Literary Works

Abstract

Character relationships in literary works can be interpreted and analyzed from the perspective of social networks. Analysis of intricate character relationships helps to better understand the internal logic of plot development and explore the significance of a literary work. This paper attempts to extract social networks from Chinese literary works based on co-word analysis. In order to analyze character relationships, both social network analysis and cluster analysis are carried out. Network analysis is performed by calculating degree distribution, clustering coefficient, shortest path length, centrality, etc. Cluster analysis is used for partitioning characters into groups. In addition, an improved visualization method of hierarchical clustering is proposed, which can clearly exhibit character relationships within clusters and the hierarchical structure of clusters. Finally, experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method succeeds in establishing a comprehensive framework for extracting networks and analyzing character relationships in Chinese literary works.

Remus, Lupin and Moony Walk in a Bar… Grouping of Proper Names Related to the Same Denotation in Large Literary Texts Collections

“…As it noted in [13] "The weight of a link between two nodes in a social network can be used to represent the similarity of two characters. The larger the weight is, the more likely the two characters will be related to each other."…”

Research hotspots and theme trends in post-traumatic growth: A co-word analysis based on keywords

“…in the middle and later of the 1970s [ 21 ]. In the late 1990s, as one of the content analysis methods, co-word analysis was basically mature, applied to various disciplines, and achieved fruitful research results [ 9 , 22 ]. Further, co-word analysis is also a bibliometric analysis method, which is based on the fact that a set of professional words can represent research literature in a certain field [ 23 ].…”