Serial Speakers: a Dataset of TV Series

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 4256–4264 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 4256 Serial Speakers: a Dataset of TV Series Xavier Bost, Vincent Labatut, Georges Linar`es Orkis, Laboratoire Informatique d’Avignon 13290 Aix-en-Provence, France, 84000 Avignon, France {firstname.lastname}@univ-avignon.fr Abstract For over a decade, TV series have been drawing increasing interest, both from the audience and from various academic fields. But while most viewers are hooked on the continuous plots of TV serials, the few annotated datasets available to researchers focus on standalone episodes of classical TV series. We aim at filling this gap by providing the multimedia/speech processing communities with Serial Speakers, an annotated dataset of 155 episodes from three popular American TV serials: Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones and House of Cards. Serial Speakers is suitable both for investigating multimedia retrieval in realistic use case scenarios, and for addressing lower level speech related tasks in especially challenging conditions. We publicly release annotations for every speech turn (boundaries, speaker) and scene boundary, along with annotations for shot boundaries, recurring shots, and interacting speakers in a subset of episodes. Because of copyright restrictions, the textual content of the speech turns is encrypted in the public version of the dataset, but we provide the users with a simple online tool to recover the plain text from their own subtitle files. Keywords: TV series, Multimedia retrieval, Speech processing. 1. Introduction For over a decade now, TV series have been drawing in- creasing attention. In 2019, the final season of Game of Thrones, one of the most popular TV shows these past few years, has averaged 44.2 million viewers per episode; many TV series have huge communities of fans, resulting in numerous online crowdsourced resources, such as wikis1, dedicated forums2, and YouTube channels. Long dismissed as a minor genre by the critics, some recent TV series also received critical acclaim as a unique space of creativity, able to attract even renowned full-length movie directors, such as Jane Campion, David Fincher or Martin Scorsese. Nowadays, TV series have their own festivals3. For more than half of the people4 we polled in the survey reproduced in (Bost, 2016), watching TV series is a daily occupation, as can be seen on Fig. 1a. daily weekly monthly less never 54.4 28.3 9.4 5.6 2.2 (a) Viewing frequency (%). streaming download TV DVD 45.2 28.5 21.3 4.9 (b) Viewing media (%). Figure 1: TV series, viewing conditions. Such a success is probably related to the cultural changes 1gameofthrones.wikia.com/wiki/Game of Thrones Wiki 2asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php?/forum 3In France, Series Mania. 4194 individuals, mostly students from our university, aged 23.12 ± 5.73. caused by modern media: high-speed internet connections led to unprecedented viewing opportunities. As shown on Fig. 1b, television is no longer the main channel used to watch “TV” series: most of the time, streaming and down- loading services are preferred to television. Unlike television, streaming and downloading platforms give control to the user, not only over the contents …

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