Visual and Memory–Augmented Soccer Commentary Generation

Haoran Sun, Natthawut Kertkeidkachorn, Kiyoaki Shirai


Abstract
Automatic soccer commentary generation aims to bridge the gap between raw visual content and professional, tactical commentary. However, existing datasets tend to produce incomplete commentary that lacks semantic richness and fails to convey the full visual information present in standard video clips. To address these limitations, we propose two manually curated datasets: SN-Short, which enhances scene-level semantic descriptions, and SN-Long, which captures event continuity for context-aware commentary.Based on these, we design a commentary augmentation pipeline that transforms incomplete annotations into MatchText, a semantically complete and structurally standardized dataset. Leveraging this supervision, we introduce MatchAware, a generation model that incorporates contextual cues from previous events to produce coherent commentary aligned with the visual flow of the game. Experimental results show that proposed approach significantly outperforms existing baselines on the constructed datasets.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.485
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10614–10629
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.485/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Haoran Sun, Natthawut Kertkeidkachorn, and Kiyoaki Shirai. 2026. Visual and Memory–Augmented Soccer Commentary Generation. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 10614–10629, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Visual and Memory–Augmented Soccer Commentary Generation (Sun et al., ACL 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.485.pdf
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