A character network is a graph extracted from a narrative in which vertices represent characters and edges correspond to interactions between them. A number of narrative-related problems can be addressed automatically through the analysis of character networks, such as summarization, classification, or role detection. Character networks are particularly relevant when considering works of fiction (e.g., novels, plays, movies, TV series), as their exploitation allows developing information retrieval and recommendation systems. However, works of fiction possess specific properties that make these tasks harder. This survey aims at presenting and organizing the scientific literature related to the extraction of character networks from works of fiction, as well as their analysis. We first describe the extraction process in a generic way and explain how its constituting steps are implemented in practice, depending on the medium of the narrative, the goal of the network analysis, and other factors. We then review the descriptive tools used to characterize character networks, with a focus on the way they are interpreted in this context. We illustrate the relevance of character networks by also providing a review of applications derived from their analysis. Finally, we identify the limitations of the existing approaches and the most promising perspectives.

Community detection has become a very important part in complex networks analysis. Authors traditionally test their algorithms on a few real or artificial networks. Testing on real networks is necessary, but also limited: the considered real networks are usually small, the actual underlying communities are generally not defined objectively, and it is not possible to control their properties. Generating artificial networks makes it possible to overcome these limitations. Until recently though, most works used variations of the classic Erdős-Rényi random model and consequently suffered from the same flaws, generating networks not realistic enough. In this work, we use Lancichinetti et al. model, which is able to generate networks with controlled power-law degree and community distributions, to test some community detection algorithms. We analyze the properties of the generated networks and use the normalized mutual information measure to assess the quality of the results and compare the considered algorithms.

Many algorithms have been proposed for revealing the community structure in complex networks. Tests under a wide range of realistic conditions must be performed in order to select the most appropriate for a particular application. Artificially generated networks are often used for this purpose. The most realistic generative method to date has been proposed by Lancichinetti, Fortunato and Radicchi (LFR). However, it does not produce networks with some typical features of real-world networks. To overcome this drawback, we investigate two alternative modifications of this algorithm. Experimental results show that in both cases, centralisation and degree correlation values of generated networks are closer to those encountered in real-world networks. The three benchmarks have been used on a wide set of prominent community detection algorithms in order to reveal the limits and the robustness of the algorithms. Results show that the detection of meaningful communities gets harder with more realistic networks, and particularly when the proportion of inter-community links increases.