Descriptive video service (DVS) provides linguistic descriptions of movies
and allows visually impaired people to follow a movie along with their peers.
Such descriptions are by design mainly visual and thus naturally form an
interesting data source for computer vision and computational linguistics. In
this work we propose a novel dataset which contains transcribed DVS, which is
temporally aligned to full length HD movies. In addition we also collected the
aligned movie scripts which have been used in prior work and compare the two
different sources of descriptions. In total the Movie Description dataset
contains a parallel corpus of over 54,000 sentences and video snippets from 72
HD movies. We characterize the dataset by benchmarking different approaches for
generating video descriptions. Comparing DVS to scripts, we find that DVS is
far more visual and describes precisely what is shown rather than what should
happen according to the scripts created prior to movie production