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Visualize classic play’s composing patterns: a weighted motif mining framework

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Abstract

Given a corpus of western classic plays, how to efficiently mine their potential composing patterns is an open issue in computational linguistics. Several methods have been proposed to extract and analyze their character networks, however at least two problems remain unsolved: (1) the modeling is time-consuming and imprecise since it is difficult to identify “who talks to whom”, and (2) the analysis fails to reveal the evolving path from micro features to macro emergences, where the key attribute of plays, i.e. diversified protagonist characteristics, shaped. In this paper, by making good use of the play narratage (off screen voice) and the network motif theory, we propose a novel mining framework, called wMotif. The framework consists of five algorithms, preprocessing, stage iteration, character identification, character correlating and weighted motif mining. Considering top 9 referred network indices as contenders, we take 65 real-world classic plays as the dataset and evaluate wMotif’s performance upon a playwright predicting problem. Comparisons show that wMotif is superior in precision, complexity and visualization. Through wMotif we find that, (1) complete triads with pure strong (motif #1306) or weak (motif #1360) edges are the top two significant patterns for playwright predicting, and (2) given a strong speaker-to-listener correlation, whether in most cases both ends loosely connect to a shared character (motif #512) can indicate a work’s genre.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by National Nature Science Foundation of China under grant No.61702320, Shanghai Municipal Education Commission Funds of Teaching Science Research Program No.C17014 and Shanghai Municipal Education Commission Funds of Young Teacher Training Program No.ZZSDJ17021. The authors also thank all anonymous reviewers who greatly help improve the quality of this paper.

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  1. School of Electronics and Information, Shanghai Dianji University, Shanghai, 201306, China

    Jiandun Li, Dingyu Yang & Pin Lv

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  1. Jiandun Li
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  3. Pin Lv
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Correspondence to Jiandun Li.

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Li, J., Yang, D. & Lv, P. Visualize classic play’s composing patterns: a weighted motif mining framework. Multimed Tools Appl 78, 5989–6012 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-018-6405-7

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