Character Coreference Resolution in Movie Screenplays

Sabyasachee Baruah, Shrikanth Narayanan


Abstract
Movie screenplays have a distinct narrative structure. It segments the story into scenes containing interleaving descriptions of actions, locations, and character dialogues.A typical screenplay spans several scenes and can include long-range dependencies between characters and events.A holistic document-level understanding of the screenplay requires several natural language processing capabilities, such as parsing, character identification, coreference resolution, action recognition, summarization, and attribute discovery. In this work, we develop scalable and robust methods to extract the structural information and character coreference clusters from full-length movie screenplays. We curate two datasets for screenplay parsing and character coreference — MovieParse and MovieCoref, respectively.We build a robust screenplay parser to handle inconsistencies in screenplay formatting and leverage the parsed output to link co-referring character mentions.Our coreference models can scale to long screenplay documents without drastically increasing their memory footprints.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.654
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10300–10313
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.654
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.654
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sabyasachee Baruah and Shrikanth Narayanan. 2023. Character Coreference Resolution in Movie Screenplays. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 10300–10313, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Character Coreference Resolution in Movie Screenplays (Baruah & Narayanan, Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/improve-issue-templates/2023.findings-acl.654.pdf