Extraction of characteristic patterns of roles and number of characters in a story scene

Abstract

Characters are one of the essential elements that make a story interesting. For this reason, there have been many studies on the roles of characters and their relationships. However, there have been few studies that have analyzed the characters themselves and other elements in a complex and quantitative manner. In this study, we categorized battle and sports boy’s comic by scene and constructed a dataset on the number and roles of characters. After that, we extracted relationships among narrative functions, roles, and numbers of characters, and made comparisons among genres using the χ-square test and factor analysis. As a result, we obtained characteristic patterns such as "appearance of strong enemy", "training", and "battle" for battle stories, and "match", "adversary conflict", and "rival's point of view" factors for sports stories. These patterns can be applied to the automatic generation of stories and the construction of support systems for creators.