An Annotated Dataset of Literary Entities

We present a new dataset comprised of 210,532 tokens evenly drawn from 100 different English-language literary texts annotated for ACE entity categories (person, location, geo-political entity, facility, organization, and vehicle). These categories include non-named entities (such as "the boy", "the kitchen") and nested structure (such as [[the cook]'s sister]). In contrast to existing datasets built primarily on news (focused on geopolitical entities and organizations), literary texts offer strikingly different distributions of entity categories, with much stronger emphasis on people and description of settings. We present empirical results demonstrating the performance of nested entity recognition models in this domain; training natively on in-domain literary data yields an improvement of over 20 absolute points in F-score (from 45.7 to 68.3), and mitigates a disparate impact in performance for male and female entities present in models trained on news data.