Movie Plot Analysis via Turning Point Identification

Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, pages 1707–1717, Hong Kong, China, November 3–7, 2019. c⃝2019 Association for Computational Linguistics 1707 Movie Plot Analysis via Turning Point Identification Pinelopi Papalampidi Frank Keller Mirella Lapata Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB p.papalampidi@sms.ed.ac.uk, {keller,mlap}@inf.ed.ac.uk Abstract According to screenwriting theory, turning points (e.g., change of plans, major setback, climax) are crucial narrative moments within a screenplay: they define the plot structure, determine its progression and thematic units (e.g., setup, complications, aftermath). We propose the task of turning point identification in movies as a means of analyzing their narra- tive structure. We argue that turning points and the segmentation they provide can facilitate processing long, complex narratives, such as screenplays, for summarization and question answering. We introduce a dataset consist- ing of screenplays and plot synopses annotated with turning points and present an end-to-end neural network model that identifies turning points in plot synopses and projects them onto scenes in screenplays. Our model outperforms strong baselines based on state-of-the-art sen- tence representations and the expected posi- tion of turning points. 1 Introduction Computational literary analysis works at the inter- section of natural language processing and literary studies, aiming to evaluate various theories of sto- rytelling (e.g., by examining a collection of works within a single genre, by an author, or topic) and to develop tools which aid in searching, visualizing, or summarizing literary content. Within natural language processing, computa- tional literary analysis has mostly targeted works of fiction such as novels, plays, and screenplays. Examples include analyzing characters, their rela- tionships, and emotional trajectories (Chaturvedi et al., 2017; Iyyer et al., 2016; Elsner, 2012), iden- tifying enemies and allies (Nalisnick and Baird, 2013), villains or heroes (Bamman et al., 2014, 2013), measuring the memorability of quotes (Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil et al., 2012), charac- terizing gender representation in dialogue (Agar- wal et al., 2015; Ramakrishna et al., 2015; Sap et al., 2017), identifying perpetrators in crime se- Turning Point Description 1. Opportunity Introductory event that occurs after the presentation of the setting and the background of the main characters. 2. Change of Plans Event where the main goal of the story is defined. From this point on, the ac- tion begins to increase. 3. Point of No Return Event that pushes the main charac- ter(s) to fully commit to their goal. 4. Major Setback Event where everything falls apart (temporarily or permanently). 5. Climax Final event of the main story, mo- ment of resolution and the “biggest spoiler”. Table 1: Turning points and their definitions. ries (Frermann et al., 2018), summarizing screen- plays (Gorinski and Lapata, 2018), and answer- ing questions about long and complex narratives (Koˇcisk`y et al., 2018). In this paper we are interested in the automatic analysis of narrative structure in screenplays. Nar- rative structure, also referred to as a storyline or plotline, describes the framework of …

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