Towards annotation of text worlds in a literary work

Abstract: Literary texts are usually rich in meanings and their interpretation complicates corpus studies and automatic processing. There have been several attempts to create collections of literary texts with annotation of literary elements like the author's speech, characters, events, scenes etc. However, they resulted in small collections and standalone rules for annotation. The present article describes an experiment on lexical annotation of text worlds in a literary work and quantitative methods of their comparison. The experiment shows that for a well-agreed tag assignment annotation rules should be set much more strictly. However, if borders between text worlds and other elements are the result of a subjective interpretation, they should be modeled as fuzzy entities.