Many texts incorporate multiple voices: the voice of the narrator and those of the characters or people who are quoted by the narrator. Separating these quotations from the surrounding text is relevant for many applications: In the field of literary studies it is a requirement for studies concerning character representation like sentiment analysis (e.g. Blessing et al. 2016; Schmidt / Burghardt / Dennerlein 2018) or character networks (e.g. Rydberg-Cox 2011; Dimpel 2018). For non-fictional texts, recognizing quotations is relevant for question answering and similar tasks. As those applications rely on processing a lot of textual material, having a way to automatically detect instances of direct speech (DS) is crucial.