---
title: "Coreference annotation for characterising characters in literary"
description: "The authors build a first public Portuguese literary dataset that annotates character coreference… 28 references, cited by 1 paper here."
authors: ["Diana Santos", "Luisa Mara Silva Lima", "Emanoel Pires"]
year: 2026
venue: "Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2026) - Vol. 1"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/2026.propor-1.56/"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
title_orig: "Marcação de correferência para a caracterização de personagens em obras literárias em português"
title_lang: "pt"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/santos-2026-marcacao-de-correferencia-para-caracterizacao/"
---
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# Coreference annotation for characterising characters in literary works in Portuguese

*Original (Portuguese): Marcação de correferência para a caracterização de personagens em obras literárias em português*

**Authors:** [Diana Santos](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/diana-santos/), Luisa Mara Silva Lima and Emanoel Pires · **Year:** 2026 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2026) - Vol. 1](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/propor/) ([International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese 2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/propor/2026/)) · **Publisher:** [Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/association-for-computational-linguistics/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2026.propor-1.56/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2026.propor-1.56.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W7162157828)

**Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [1](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/santos-2026-marcacao-de-correferencia-para-caracterizacao/cited-by/) in our library, of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Computational literary studies and distant reading need to follow characters through a whole text, but systems that rely only on proper names miss most mentions. In Portuguese, characters are often referred to through pronouns, forms of address or null (unexpressed) subjects. The authors build a first public Portuguese literary dataset that annotates character coreference, including the attribution of null subjects to characters, which earlier English and German resources did not handle. They started from three canonical Brazilian novels in the OBras corpus that already had character networks. The tabular AC/DC format was converted into BRAT so that literary scholars could annotate and review the texts easily. The results were then converted back into a new AC/DC column, which keeps corpus queries and concordances available. Annotating six characters showed three to eight times more mentions than proper names alone yield. The resource lays groundwork for character profiling by actions and attributes. The authors also plan two coreference modules, one open-source rule-based and one based on machine learning.

## Key points
- **Novels annotated**:
  - *Úrsula* (1859, Romantic; 53,568 units)
  - *O Cortiço* (1890, Naturalist; 95,472 units)
  - *Canaã* (1902, Pre-Modernist; 90,167 units)
- **Characters covered**: João Romão, Rita Baiana, Úrsula, Tancredo, Milkau and Maria. The annotations are released in both BRAT and tabular (AC/DC) formats.
- **What was marked**: possessive pronouns, personal pronouns, forms of address and null subjects.
- **What was excluded**: nominal anaphora, cataphora (mentions before the first proper name), unnamed characters and characters referred to only as part of a group.
- **Motivation for null subjects**: prior counts with UDpipe on OBras found that about 41% of verbs in Brazilian literary texts lack an explicit subject. The share is likely higher in European Portuguese.
- **Pipeline context**: the work builds on the DIP challenge and the PALAVRAS parser, which supplies explicit subjects. Verb lists linked to each character are intended for later profiling and comparison of characters.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [University of Oslo](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-oslo/) — University, Oslo, Norway · 51 works · 4,155 citations

Also on the byline: [Universidade Estadual do Maranhão](https://ror.org/04ja5n907).

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🧭 Topics (1): [🔗 Coreference resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/coreference-resolution/) · 574 works

## Cite

Cite as: Diana Santos, Luisa Mara Silva Lima and Emanoel Pires. 2026. Marcação de correferência para a caracterização de personagens em obras literárias em português. Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2026) - Vol. 1.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{santos2026marcacao,
  title = {{Marcação de correferência para a caracterização de personagens em obras literárias em português}},
  author = {Diana Santos, Luisa Mara Silva Lima and Emanoel Pires},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2026) - Vol. 1},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2026.propor-1.56/}
}
```

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## References

28 references, 2 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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*Updated 1 November 2026*