Generating Animations from Screenplays

Yeyao Zhang, Eleftheria Tsipidi, Sasha Schriber, Mubbasir Kapadia, Markus Gross, Ashutosh Modi

Abstract
Automatically generating animation from natural language text finds application in a number of areas e.g. movie script writing, instructional videos, and public safety. However, translating natural language text into animation is a challenging task. Existing text-to-animation systems can handle only very simple sentences, which limits their applications. In this paper, we develop a text-to-animation system which is capable of handling complex sentences. We achieve this by introducing a text simplification step into the process. Building on an existing animation generation system for screenwriting, we create a robust NLP pipeline to extract information from screenplays and map them to the system’s knowledge base. We develop a set of linguistic transformation rules that simplify complex sentences. Information extracted from the simplified sentences is used to generate a rough storyboard and video depicting the text. Our sentence simplification module outperforms existing systems in terms of BLEU and SARI metrics. We further evaluated our system via a user study: 68% participants believe that our system generates reasonable animation from input screenplays.
Anthology ID:
S19-1032
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2019)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Rada Mihalcea, Ekaterina Shutova, Lun-Wei Ku, Kilian Evang, Soujanya Poria
Venue:
*SEM
SIGs:
SIGLEX | SIGSEM
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
292–307
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/S19-1032
DOI:
10.18653/v1/S19-1032
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yeyao Zhang, Eleftheria Tsipidi, Sasha Schriber, Mubbasir Kapadia, Markus Gross, and Ashutosh Modi. 2019. Generating Animations from Screenplays. In Proceedings of the Eighth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2019), pages 292–307, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Generating Animations from Screenplays (Zhang et al., *SEM 2019)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp22-frontmatter/S19-1032.pdf
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