Unravelling names of fictional characters

Abstract

In this paper we explore the correlation between the sound of words and their meaning, by testing if the polarity ('good guy' or 'bad guy') of a character's role in a work of fiction can be predicted by the name of the character in the absence of any other context. Our approach is based on phonological and other features proposed in prior theoretical studies of fictional names. These features are used to construct a predictive model over a manually annotated corpus of characters from motion pictures. By experimenting with different mixtures of features, we identify phonological features as being the most discriminative by comparison to social and other types of features, and we delve into a discussion of specific phonological and phonotactic indicators of a character's role's polarity.