1. Identifying Personas in English Literature
Senior Project
Liana Nunziato
Advisor - Nick Webb

2. What is a “persona” ?
The Merriam Webster dictionary defines a persona as ''the way you behave, talk, etc., with other people that causes them to see you as a particular kind of person: the image or personality that a person presents to other people.''
Persona:
Actions
Dialog
Behavior 2

3. Why Identify Personas in Literature?
We can better understand:
Character’s emotions
Character’s state of mind
Storyline
Understanding storyline => understanding society
Ex. Late 18th/Early 19th Century - Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Though understanding this, we gain a better understanding of fictional novels, which is important for understand ideas/thoughts influenced society at that time
As an example, understanding Sense and Sensibility gives us a better sense of the importance of marriage in Jane Austen’s era in order for a woman to be accepted in society. 3

4. Sense and Sensibility
Elinor, this eldest daughter, whose advice was so effectual, possessed a strength of understanding, and coolness of judgment, which qualified her, though only nineteen, to be the counsellor of her mother, and enabled her frequently to counteract, to the advantage of them all, that eagerness of mind in Mrs. Dashwood which must generally have led to imprudence.
*Read slide to audience*
This is ONE sentence in Sense and Sensibility, and there is a ton of information.
It can be overwhelming to try and get all the information, especially if you aren’t used to reading 19th century text.
I wanted to develop a tool that could be used to assist people when they read the text.

5. Sense and Sensibility
Elinor, this eldest daughter, whose advice was so effectual, possessed a strength of understanding, and coolness of judgment, which qualified her, though only nineteen, to be the counsellor of her mother, and enabled her frequently to counteract, to the advantage of them all, that eagerness of mind in Mrs. Dashwood which must generally have led to imprudence.

6. Hypothesis
Can I use NLP techniques to identify the persona of a character in a text?
Persona = How a character is:
Judged
Viewed
Talked About
Through looking at the adjectives and verbs in a sentence that contains a character name, I can find descriptive words of a character as well as the overall polarity of that character.

7. Approach
Use existing tools to attach part of speech (POS) labels to each word in the text
Adjectives and verbs in a sentence with a character name are removed
Use an existing corpus called Subjectivity Lexicon that has tagged words with a polarity. I attach a polarity to word associated with character
Ex. abandon = negative polarity
Polarity = -1
Theresa Wilson, Janyce Wiebe, and Paul Hoffmann (2005). Recognizing Contextual Polarity in Phrase-Level Sentiment Analysis. Proc. Of HLT-EMNLP-2005
NLTK - pieces of text
Pos Tag sentences, and separate into lists
Make sure words in lists are not stopwords and are in MPQA
Find the overall polarity of the sentence

8. Example
Elinor, this eldest daughter, whose advice was so effectual, possessed a strength of understanding, and coolness of judgment, which qualified her, though only nineteen, to be the counsellor of her mother, and enabled her frequently to counteract, to the advantage of them all, that eagerness of mind in Mrs. Dashwood which must generally have led to imprudence.
First I take out the adjectives and verbs in a sentence that has a characters name,
it appears like the second have of the slide.
I then take out the stop words, which has proved to show more relevant words.
I am now making sure that the word is in the MPQA corpus before adding it to the list of descriptive words for that character.
This would also allow me to keep track of polarity of a character through the MPQA corpus
Output:
Present Tense Verbs ‘VB’: be, counteract, have, imprudence
Past Participle Verbs ‘VBN’: was, enabled,
Past Tense Verbs ‘VBD’: possessed, qualified, nineteen, led,
Adjectives: effectual, strength, coolness, qualified, eagerness

9. Implementing Polarity
Output:
Present Tense Verbs ‘VB’:
have, imprudence
Past Tense Verbs ‘VBD’:
possessed, led
Adjectives:
effectual, strength, coolness, qualified, eagerness
Polarity Count = 5 -2 = 3

10. Marianne’s Persona
A dreamer, who doesn’t think about her actions before she acts
Very emotional and is either very happy or very hurt
She does not read other people well and is very mistaken about their personas

11. Marianne
Present tense Verbs (VB): [(‘hope’, 12), (‘help’, 9), (‘excuse’, 9), (‘think’, 8), (‘gain’, 8)]
Verbs that are tagged as ’VBN’: [(‘thought’, 32), (‘felt’, 19), (‘knew’, 9), (‘fell’, 3), (‘resolved’, 2)]
Verbs that are tagged as ’VBD’: [(‘thought’, 6), (‘felt’, 6), (‘mistaken’, 5), (‘pleased’, 4), (‘hurt’, 4)]
ADJ: [(‘great’, 21), (‘much’, 20), (‘good’, 14), (‘happy’, 14), (‘sure’, 12)]

12. Total Polarity by Character in Sense and Sensibility

13. Polarity by Chapter of the Main Characters in Sense and Sensibility
Willoughby is talked of so fondly by everyone, so his polarity is very high.
Edward starts out with a low polarity, because he is quite reserved, but as he proves his love to Elinor, he gains respect from others.
Elinor is disliked by Marianne and always the voice of reason, which gives her a negative polarity in the beginning of the novel but then there is a direct correlation of her being there for her sisters depression and her polarity increasing.
Marianne is generally well liked. There is a major dip in her polarity which correlates with her depression in the novel.
Brandon starts out generally negative in polarity because Marianne does not like him and it increases at the end of the novel when Marianne likes him and falls in love with him. A less present character, his numbers are lower

14. Polarity Comparison of Elinor and Edward in Sense and Sensibility
The plateau and slight dip in Edwards polarity is due to Elinor finding out that he is engaged. It increases again when Edward makes it clear that he wishes to be out of the engagement

15. Polarity Comparison of Marianne and Brandon in Sense and Sensibility
As you can see, after Marianne find out that Willoughby is a bad guy, her polarity decreases because she is depressed. Immediately after, Brandon’s polarity increases.

16. Polarity by Chapter of Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility
I was surprised that there was not more of a dip in his polarity after he was found out to be a scoundrel, but he does apologize for his actions which explains the bump in his polarity.

17. Future Work
Show persona data to students that have taken Austen seminar
Finish generating new data from additional books