Natural Language Processing–Driven Knowledge Extraction for Ethical Decision Support: A Case Study of the Cat Who Saved Books
Abstract
Current perspectives on leadership focus increasingly on ethical responsibility, empathy, knowledge sharing, and valuing of human beings rather than mere authority. Literary texts offer an opportunity to analyze such aspects in terms of the development of characters, conflicts, and processes of personal transformation. This research focuses on Sosuke Natsukawa's novel The Cat Who Saved Books in order to explore the connection between ethical leadership, knowledge, reading, empathy, and moral development. This research employs qualitative literary research method complemented by basic NLP-based textual analysis. Close reading was applied to identify significant events, dialogues, and the development of characters, while NLP-based keyword and thematic analysis was used to detect recurrent patterns in the text. The analysis concentrated on seven themes, namely, knowledge and wisdom, ethical leadership, empathy and compassion, reading and books, dialogue and communication, intellectual humility, and inclusive relationships. Interpretation of the themes is based on Ethical Leadership Theory and Knowledge Creation Theory. In total, 180 thematic occurrences were found relevant to the analysis of selected texts. These included knowledge/wisdom (23.3%), ethical leadership (19.4%), empathy/compassion (16.1%), reading and books (15.0%), dialogue/communication (11.7%), intellectual humility (7.8%) and inclusive relationships (6.7%). These results show that the novel makes a strong connection between knowledge, moral responsibility and personal transformation. The results reveal that the development of Rintaro reflects the idea of ethical development of leadership as a process, not a formal position. Books in this context are seen as reflections of wisdom, empathy, reflection and responsibility. While NLP helps to prove this hypothesis using patterns in texts, literary interpretation is the key to their analysis. This research can be used as an argument within interdisciplinary discussion about literature, ethical leadership and responsible knowledge usage.