Portrayal: Leveraging NLP and Visualization for Analyzing Fictional Characters

Abstract

Many creative writing tasks (e.g., fiction writing) require authors to write complex narrative components (e.g., characterization, events, dialogue) over the course of a long story. Similarly, literary scholars need to manually annotate and interpret texts to understand such abstract components. In this paper, we explore how Natural Language Processing (NLP) and interactive visualization can help writers and scholars in such scenarios. To this end, we present Portrayal, an interactive visualization system for analyzing characters in a story. Portrayal extracts natural language indicators from a text to capture the characterization process and then visualizes the indicators in an interactive interface. We evaluated the system with 12 creative writers and scholars in a one-week-long qualitative study. Our findings suggest Portrayal helped writers revise their drafts and create dynamic characters and scenes. It helped scholars analyze characters without the need for any manual annotation, and design literary arguments with concrete evidence.

References in corpus (12)

• Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer
• Language Models are Few-Shot Learners
• Word Embeddings Quantify 100 Years of Gender and Ethnic Stereotypes
• Deep Recurrent Quantization for Generating Sequential Binary Codes
• Beyond Product Quantization: Deep Progressive Quantization for Image Retrieval
• CoAuthor: Designing a Human-AI Collaborative Writing Dataset for Exploring Language Model Capabilities
• The Bayesian Case Model: A Generative Approach for Case-Based Reasoning and Prototype Classification
• Beyond Text Generation: Supporting Writers with Continuous Automatic Text Summaries
• Outcome-Explorer: A Causality Guided Interactive Visual Interface for Interpretable Algorithmic Decision Making
• Read, Revise, Repeat: A System Demonstration for Human-in-the-loop Iterative Text Revision
• DramatVis Personae: Visual Text Analytics for Identifying Social Biases in Creative Writing
• Co-Writing Screenplays and Theatre Scripts with Language Models: An Evaluation by Industry Professionals

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Patchview: LLM-Powered Worldbuilding with Generative Dust and Magnet Visualization
• Beyond Productivity: Rethinking the Impact of Creativity Support Tools
• Making the Write Connections: Linking Writing Support Tools with Writer's Needs
• Visual Story-Writing: Writing by Manipulating Visual Representations of Stories
• Human-Computer Interaction and Visualization in Natural Language Generation Models: Applications, Challenges, and Opportunities