Summarization of Films and Documentaries Based on Subtitles and Scripts

We assess the performance of generic text summarization algorithms applied to films and documentaries, using the well-known behavior of summarization of news articles as reference. We use three datasets: (i) news articles, (ii) film scripts and subtitles, and (iii) documentary subtitles. Standard ROUGE metrics are used for comparing generated summaries against news abstracts, plot summaries, and synopses. We show that the best performing algorithms are LSA, for news articles and documentaries, and LexRank and Support Sets, for films. Despite the different nature of films and documentaries, their relative behavior is in accordance with that obtained for news articles.Comment: 7 pages, 9 tables, 4 figures, submitted to Pattern Recognition Letters (Elsevier

Automatic movie analysis and summarisation

Automatic movie analysis is the task of employing Machine Learning methods to the field of screenplays, movie scripts, and motion pictures to facilitate or enable various tasks throughout the entirety of a movie’s life-cycle. From helping with making informed decisions about a new movie script with respect to aspects such as its originality, similarity to other movies, or even commercial viability, all the way to offering consumers new and interesting ways of viewing the final movie, many stages in the life-cycle of a movie stand to benefit from Machine Learning techniques that promise to reduce human effort, time, or both. Within this field of automatic movie analysis, this thesis addresses the task of summarising the content of screenplays, enabling users at any stage to gain a broad understanding of a movie from greatly reduced data. The contributions of this thesis are four-fold: (i)We introduce ScriptBase, a new large-scale data set of original movie scripts, annotated with additional meta-information such as genre and plot tags, cast information, and log- and tag-lines. To our knowledge, Script- Base is the largest data set of its kind, containing scripts and information for almost 1,000 Hollywood movies. (ii) We present a dynamic summarisation model for the screenplay domain, which allows for extraction of highly informative and important scenes from movie scripts. The extracted summaries allow for the content of the original script to stay largely intact and provide the user with its important parts, while greatly reducing the script-reading time. (iii) We extend our summarisation model to capture additional modalities beyond the screenplay text. The model is rendered multi-modal by introducing visual information obtained from the actual movie and by extracting scenes from the movie, allowing users to generate visual summaries of motion pictures. (iv) We devise a novel end-to-end neural network model for generating natural language screenplay overviews. This model enables the user to generate short descriptive and informative texts that capture certain aspects of a movie script, such as its genres, approximate content, or style, allowing them to gain a fast, high-level understanding of the screenplay. Multiple automatic and human evaluations were carried out to assess the performance of our models, demonstrating that they are well-suited for the tasks set out in this thesis, outperforming strong baselines. Furthermore, the ScriptBase data set has started to gain traction, and is currently used by a number of other researchers in the field to tackle various tasks relating to screenplays and their analysis

A STATISTICAL FRAMEWORK FOR VIDEO SKIMMING BASED ON LOGICAL STORY UNITS AND MOTION ACTIVITY

In this work we present a method for video skimming based on hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and motion activity. Specifically, a set of HMMs is used to model subsequent log- ical story units, where the HMM states represent different visual-concepts, the transitions model the temporal dependencies in each story unit, and stochastic observations are given by single shots. The video skim is generated as an observation sequence, where, in order to privilege more informa- tive segments for entering the skim, dynamic shots are assigned higher probability of observation. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated on a video set from different kinds of programmes, and results are evaluated in terms of metrics that measure the content representational value of the obtained video skims