Personality profiling of fictional characters using sense-level links between lexical resources

Abstract

This study focuses on personality prediction of protagonists in novels based on the Five-Factor Model of personality. We present and publish a novel collaboratively built dataset of fictional character personality and design our task as a text classification problem. We incorporate a range of semantic features, including WordNet and VerbNet sense-level information and word vector representations. We evaluate three machine learning models based on the speech, actions and predicatives of the main characters, and show that especially the lexical-semantic features significantly outperform the baselines. The most predictive features correspond to reported findings in personality psychology.