A Pilot Experiment on Exploiting Translations for Literary Studies on Kafka's "Verwandlung"

We present a manually annotated word alignment of Franz Kafka’s “Verwandlung” and use this as a controlled test case to assess the principled usefulness of word alignment as an additional information source for the (monolingually motivated) identification of literary characters, focusing on the technically wellexplored task of co-reference resolution. This pilot set-up allows us to illustrate a number of methodological components interacting in a modular architecture. In general, co-reference resolution is a relatively hard task, but the availability of word-aligned translations can provide additional indications, as there is a tendency for translations to explicate underspecified or vague passages.