Many creative writing tasks (e.g., fiction writing) require authors to write complex narrative components (e.g., characterization, events, dialogue) over the course of a long story. Similarly, literary scholars need to manually annotate and interpret texts to understand such abstract components. In this paper, we explore how Natural Language Processing (NLP) and interactive visualization can help writers and scholars in such scenarios. To this end, we present Portrayal, an interactive visualization system for analyzing characters in a story. Portrayal extracts natural language indicators from a text to capture the characterization process and then visualizes the indicators in an interactive interface. We evaluated the system with 12 creative writers and scholars in a one-week-long qualitative study. Our findings suggest Portrayal helped writers revise their drafts and create dynamic characters and scenes. It helped scholars analyze characters without the need for any manual annotation, and design literary arguments with concrete evidence.

翻译：许多创造性写作任务（如小说创作）要求作者在长篇故事中编写复杂的叙事要素（如人物塑造、事件、对话）。同样，文学学者需要手动标注和解读文本，以理解此类抽象要素。本文探讨了自然语言处理（NLP）与交互式可视化如何在此类场景中辅助作者与学者。为此，我们提出了Portrayal——一个用于分析故事角色的交互式可视化系统。该系统从文本中提取自然语言指标以捕捉人物塑造过程，并在交互界面中可视化这些指标。我们通过为期一周的定性研究，对12名创意写作者与学者进行了系统评估。结果表明，Portrayal能够帮助写作者修改草稿并创作动态角色与场景，同时帮助学者无需手动标注即可分析角色，并基于具体证据构建文学论点。