Extracting social networks from fiction : Imaginary and invisible friends: Investigating the social world of imaginary friends.

Abstract: This thesis develops an approach to extract the social relation between characters in literary text to create a social network. The approach uses co-occurrences of named entities, keywords associated with the named entities, and the dependency relations that exist between the named entities to construct the network. Literary texts contain a large amount of pronouns to represent the named entities, to resolve the antecedents of pronouns, a pronoun resolution system is implemented based on a standard pronoun resolution algorithm. The results indicate that the pronoun resolution system finds the correct named entity in 60,4\% of all cases. The social network is evaluated by comparing character importance rankings based on graph properties with an independently human generated importance rankings. The generated social networks correlate moderately to strongly with the independent character ranking.