Rethinking Scene Segmentation. Advancing Automated Detection of Scene Changes in Literary Texts

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Bibliographic Details
Title: Rethinking Scene Segmentation. Advancing Automated Detection of Scene Changes in Literary Texts
Authors: Guhr, Svenja, Mao, Huijun, Lin, Fengyi
Source: Proceedings of the 9th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature (LaTeCH-CLfL 2025). :79-86
Publisher Information: Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2025.
Publication Year: 2025
Subject Terms: dime novels, text segmentation, computational literary studies, fiction, transformers, US-American Romance, 20th Century, literary texts, Universal Sentence Encoder, annotation, scene detection, language models, literary studies, operationalization, prose, scene segmentation, romance novels, narratology, automation
Description: SummaryAutomated scene segmentation remains a central challenge in computational literary studies (CLS), especially for narrative texts with fluid boundaries. This study presents a new approach to detecting scene changes in 20th-century US-English romance fiction. Building on manually annotated data from the Harlequin “Men Made in America” series and other popular fiction texts, we fine-tuned the pretrained transformer-based model Universal Sentence Encoder (USE) to identify scene changes in six-sentence segments. AcknowledgmentsMany thanks to our student annotators / other project members Mallen Clifton, Agnes Hilger, Jessica Monaco, Alexander J. Sherman, and Ellen Yang, who supported the project with their close readings, manual scene annotations, and discoveries of unconventional scene structures. The conference travel was funded by the priority program SPP 2207 Computational Literary Studies (CLS) of the German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of the Young Researcher Visiting Programme 2025.
Document Type: Article
Conference object
DOI: 10.18653/v1/2025.latechclfl-1.8
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15281017
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15281018
Rights: CC BY
Accession Number: edsair.doi.dedup.....1ba5c68570f1aa0c8135186d76269bc3
Database: OpenAIRE
Description
Abstract:SummaryAutomated scene segmentation remains a central challenge in computational literary studies (CLS), especially for narrative texts with fluid boundaries. This study presents a new approach to detecting scene changes in 20th-century US-English romance fiction. Building on manually annotated data from the Harlequin “Men Made in America” series and other popular fiction texts, we fine-tuned the pretrained transformer-based model Universal Sentence Encoder (USE) to identify scene changes in six-sentence segments. AcknowledgmentsMany thanks to our student annotators / other project members Mallen Clifton, Agnes Hilger, Jessica Monaco, Alexander J. Sherman, and Ellen Yang, who supported the project with their close readings, manual scene annotations, and discoveries of unconventional scene structures. The conference travel was funded by the priority program SPP 2207 Computational Literary Studies (CLS) of the German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of the Young Researcher Visiting Programme 2025.
DOI:10.18653/v1/2025.latechclfl-1.8