Screenplay Summarization Using Latent Narrative Structure
Pinelopi Papalampidi, Frank Keller, Lea Frermann, Mirella Lapata
Abstract
Most general-purpose extractive summarization models are trained on news articles, which are short and present all important information upfront. As a result, such models are biased on position and often perform a smart selection of sentences from the beginning of the document. When summarizing long narratives, which have complex structure and present information piecemeal, simple position heuristics are not sufficient. In this paper, we propose to explicitly incorporate the underlying structure of narratives into general unsupervised and supervised extractive summarization models. We formalize narrative structure in terms of key narrative events (turning points) and treat it as latent in order to summarize screenplays (i.e., extract an optimal sequence of scenes). Experimental results on the CSI corpus of TV screenplays, which we augment with scene-level summarization labels, show that latent turning points correlate with important aspects of a CSI episode and improve summarization performance over general extractive algorithms leading to more complete and diverse summaries.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.acl-main.174
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Online
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1920–1933
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.174
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.174
- Cite (ACL):
- Pinelopi Papalampidi, Frank Keller, Lea Frermann, and Mirella Lapata. 2020. Screenplay Summarization Using Latent Narrative Structure. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1920–1933, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Screenplay Summarization Using Latent Narrative Structure (Papalampidi et al., ACL 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-url/2020.acl-main.174.pdf
- Code
- EdinburghNLP/csi-corpus + additional community code
- Data
- CSI Screenplay Summarization Corpus, TRIPOD