Jahan

Animacy is the characteristic of being able to independently carry out actions in a story world (e.g., movement, communication). It is a necessary property of characters in stories, and so detecting animacy is an important step in automatic story understanding. Prior approaches to animacy detection have conceived of animacy as a word- or phrase-level property, without explicitly connecting it to characters. In this work we compute the animacy of referring expressions using a statistical approach incorporating features such as word embeddings on referring expression, noun, grammatical subject and semantic roles. We then compute the animacy of coreference chains via a majority vote of the animacy of the chain's constituent referring expressions.