Les Misérables dialogue mapped as a detailed social communication network
Les Misérables Dialogue: A film-based network representation of social communication
Social and Information NetworksComputation and LanguageComputers and Society
Summary
Communicating characters in Les Misérables are organized into a network where who talks to whom and when is recorded, based on the 1998 movie. The authors separate speakers, listeners, and other recipients for every conversation and label relationships by social types. They created a dataset anyone can use and showed a method to build similar communication networks from movies or stories. This helps study social interactions more clearly in storytelling or real conversations.
What this means in practice
- •For social network analysts: Use a rich dialogue dataset labeled by social roles and timing to study communication patterns in narrative contexts.
- •For game narrative designers: Build detailed character interaction models from film scripts to enhance story-driven game dialogue systems.
Tested on one dataset.
Authors
Theodora Moldovan, Georgios Panayiotou, Davide Vega
Abstract
In this work, we revisit the classic Les Misérables benchmark network from the perspective of social communication. Using the 1998 film adaptation of the novel, we construct the publicly available Les Misérables Dialogue temporal text network, which explicitly distinguishes speakers, addressees, and other recipients of each utterance, along with its content and timing. Using the ten social dimensions model, we also derive multilayer network representations of the network, in which layers correspond to distinct relational dimensions. Beyond the network dataset, this work offers a general methodology for building similarly rich communication datasets from similar narrative sources.