Finding a Character's Voice: Stylome Classification on Literary Characters

Abstract

We investigate in this paper the problem of classifying the stylome of characters in a literary work. Previous research in the field of authorship attribution has shown that the writing style of an author can be characterized and distinguished from that of other authors automatically. In this paper we take a look at the less approached problem of how the styles of different characters can be distinguished, trying to verify if an author managed to create believable characters with individual styles. We present the results of some initial experiments developed on the novel "Liaisons Dangereuses", showing that a simple bag of words model can be used to classify the characters.