Show HN: Throw a Whole Book into an LLM to Extract Characters and Relationships (opens in new tab)

I'd like to know the names of all the ladies the character "Chinasky" fucked in the book "Women".

Should be more than 20 at least.

I'm trying to understand how to judge the quality of the result, that is, to better quantify what "relatively accurate character identification and relationship mapping" means.

For example, with the "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" example, I see Bob Tanner connected to Huckleberry Finn but no one else.

Is that supposed to be significant? I pulled up the source text from https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/74/pg74-images.html :

The first occurrence is an exchange starting:

   Tom hailed the romantic outcast:
   “Hello, Huckleberry!” 
    ...
   “No, I hain’t. But Bob Tanner did.”

The last line is spoken by Huckleberry. It is clear that both kids know who Bob Tanner is, because Tom mentions "he’s the wartiest boy in this town". (The image prompt says "might be holding a bean or have warts on his hands", but the bean is the method that Tom and Huck use.)

The other context is:

> “Well, I have too,” said Tom; “oh, hundreds of times. Once down by the slaughter-house. Don’t you remember, Huck? Bob Tanner was there, and Johnny Miller, and Jeff Thatcher, when I said it. Don’t you remember, Huck, ’bout me saying that?”

So what does it mean that Huck has a connection to Bob but Tom does not, when it seems equally strong in the text?

Or, we see in the graph that "Bull Harbison" is "a dog that howls outside the tannery", which isn't correct. Tom thinks it's Bull, but after another howl they realize it's actually a stray.

Why is Mr. Jones, "the Welshman" referred to as "old man"?

Why is Mrs. Thatcher not listed? Or the Rev. Mr. Sprague, the "Useful Minister" as chapter V's title describes him?

There are also some characters mentioned only once, like "Mr. Benton, an actual United States Senator" and "Major and Mrs. Ward; lawyer Riverson", who are not on the graph, while names like Benny Taylor ("Benny Taylor’s little wagon") and Jimmy Hodges ("he more than half envied Jimmy Hodges, so lately released") are in the graph. Why?

And there's "the cat" just hanging about with no connection.

Also, there should be no link from Jimmy to Huck as its not in the text, and we don't know if Benny or Jimmy are young boys, as characterized in the bio.

The graph shows a connection between Uncle Jake and Jim ("Friends") which doesn't exist in the book, where Jake is mentioned two times in a single paragraph. Is there a built-in assumption in the model that the two named Black characters in the book, both slaves, would be friends?

It says that Mary and Aunt Polly are niece/aunt respectively, but I don't see that in the text. We know that Mary is Tom's cousin, and Polly is Tom's aunt, but we don't know the relationship between Mary and Polly. Could they be mother/daughter? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tom_Sawyer_characters#... says it's never specified.

It seems like it would be a lot of work to verify both the correctness of the generated data, and verify there are not missing parts. Does it really save time and effort?

To be sure, these are small parts of the books, but then again, Tom Sawyer is one of the most analyzed books in the American canon, where there should be a lot of examples in the corpus describing relations between the main characters.