Title: Creating Character Networks with Kinship Relations from Comics
Abstract: To find and understand comic contents, we present an approach of creating character networks with semantic relations from comics using the panels and speech balloons. First, we build a dataset that contains a comic’s characters and its words in speech balloons separated by the panels. Second, we extract the semantic relations among characters using the words in the speech balloons and panels. Third, we develop character networks by identifying the important characters using the frequencies of characters and their relatedness, and then we add semantic relations to these networks. As an initial step in finding semantic relations, we focus on kinship relations. We implement our approach and successfully build character networks from four popular Japanese comics. Finally, we evaluate our kinship relation extraction algorithms and the created character networks.