Character Coreference Resolution in Movie Screenplays (2023)

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.

## introduction screenplays are semi-structured text documents that narrate the events within the story of a movie, tv show, theatrical play, or other creative media. it contains stage directions that provide a blueprint for the produced content, offering valuable information for media understanding tasks @xcite @xcite . automated text processing methods can enable a scalable and nuanced analysis of screenplays and provide key novel insights about the narrative elements and story characteristics @xcite . this paper focuses on a critical as- int dormitory -day [dr.hager] is standing in [his] room doorway while [spaz] and [[his] father] are going over some last minute precautions over [the boy's] allergies. [[spaz's] father] hands [hager] various bottles. [father] this is for sinuses. oh, and if [he] can't swallow [you] give [him] one of these. and if [he] had trouble breathing [you] can give [him] some of those. [hager] all right fine. [dr. hager] takes the bottles and quickly backs into [his] room, shutting the door. [father] (to [son]) did [you] remember [your] vaporizer? [spaz] yes, [i] put it in [my] room. [[spaz's] father] tries to say something else to [dr. hager] but realizes [he] has already gone. int hallway -day [neil] pushes [his] way through a crowd of boys, carrying two suitcases. as [he] enters [his] room, [knox] quickly passes by. ## conclusion we introduce two movie screenplay datasets for parsing and character coreference resolution tasks. we develop a robust screenplay parser that can handle various document formatting issues. we devise inference approaches to scale coreference models to long documents without drastically increasing memory consumption and evaluate them on fulllength screenplays. future work entails applying our screenplay coreference model to gather longitudinal insights on movie character interactions.