Extracting Family Relationship Networks from Novels

We present an approach to the extraction of family relations from literary narrative, which incorporates a technique for utterance attribution proposed recently by Elson and McKeown (2010). In our work this technique is used in combination with the detection of vocatives — the explicit forms of address used by the characters in a novel. We take advantage of the fact that certain vocatives indicate family relations between speakers. The extracted relations are then propagated using a set of rules. We report the results of the application of our method to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.