The coming-of-age story is a classic archetype that typically features a clearly defined emotional arc for the protagonist. However, can we pick up on this pattern through some natural language processing and neural network techniques? In this project, we use emotional analysis with BERT to try and discern a clear emotional arc for the protagonist…

* This project was done with P-AI, an on-campus AI club. I was the project manager, and also worked with Elena, John, Kelly, and Phoebe. In this project, we trained a neural network for the task of emotional analysis and then set it loose on a collection of first-person coming-of-age texts to see if there…

The bildungsroman or coming-of-age story is a fairly common archetype in literature. Our ragtag protagonist starts off as a young and inexperienced figure that is not entirely fit for the grueling outside world. Through a series of trials and tribulations, they rise to the occasion and grow as a character, rounding off a fairly linear…