언어학적 단서를 활용한 동화 텍스트 내 발화문의 화자 파악

Identification of Speakers in Fairytales with Linguistic Clues

Identifying the speakers of individual utterances mentioned in textual stories is an important step towards developing applications that involve the use of unique characteristics of speakers in stories, such as robot storytelling and story-to-scene generation. Despite the usefulness, it is a challenging task because not only human entities but also animals and even inanimate objects can become speakers especially in fairytales so that the number of candidates is much more than that in other types of text. In addition, since the action of speaking is not always mentioned explicitly, it is necessary to infer the speaker from the implicitly mentioned speaking behaviors such as appearances or emotional expressions. In this paper, we investigate a method to exploit linguistic clues to identify the speakers of utterances from textual fairytale stories in Korean, especially in order to handle such challenging issues. Compared with the previous work, the present work takes into account additional linguistic features such as vocative roles and pairs of conversation participants, and proposes the use of discourse-level turn-taking behaviors between speakers to further reduce the number of possible candidate speakers. We describe a simple rule-based method to choose a speaker from candidates based on such linguistic features and turn-taking behaviors.