Measuring Similarities of Literary Characters

One could argue that fictional characters in literary texts, films, television series, and other artistic works become part of our lives. Although they do not possess spatio-temporal existence like flesh-and-blood individuals, their presence can be traced in our cities through museums—such as the Sherlock Holmes Museum in London or Juliet’s house in Verona—or through statues like the Rocky Balboa statue in Philadelphia. In this paper, we explore ontology-based approaches to representing and comparing interpretations of literary characters. In particular, we introduce and discuss several similarity measures between interpreted literary characters, and discuss conditions for the identification of characters across heterogeneous interpretations.