This article presents a study of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace by means of automatic syntactic and semantic analysis. Using a parser that extracts syntactic dependencies and semantic roles we were able to compare different characters of the novel in terms of the semantic roles they tend to occupy. Our data show that there are certain dependencies between the apparent personal traits of a character and his or her positions within the predicate structures. We hope that further research will help us gain more insights into the 'literary technique' of Tolstoy and enable us to create a semantic mark-up of his works.
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