Generating Character Descriptions for Automatic Summarization of Fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summaries of fictional stories allow readers to quickly decide whether or not a story catches their interest. A major challenge in automatic summarization of fiction is the lack of standardized evaluation methodology or high-quality datasets for experimentation. In this work, we take a bottomup approach to this problem by assuming that story authors are uniquely qualified to inform such decisions. We collect a dataset of one million fiction stories with accompanying author-written summaries from Wattpad, an online story sharing platform. We identify commonly occurring summary components, of which a description of the main characters is the most frequent, and elicit descriptions of main characters directly from the authors for a sample of the stories. We propose two approaches to generate character descriptions, one based on ranking attributes found in the story text, the other based on classifying into a list of pre-defined attributes. We find that the classification-based approach performs the best in predicting character descriptions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".